


make like stars dying

by anachromatism, futuredescending



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Minor Character Death, Post V-Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-14 17:22:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 46,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11212695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anachromatism/pseuds/anachromatism, https://archiveofourown.org/users/futuredescending/pseuds/futuredescending
Summary: The mission is supposed to be simple, a way to tie up loose ends in the aftermath of V-Day, but an unexpected complication puts Roxy at risk of being labelled a traitor by the very organisation to whom she’s sworn life, limb, and loyalty while forcing her to re-evaluate everything she’s ever known about herself.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks goes to my lovely Big Bang artist, [Sain](http://lsain.tumblr.com). She also voluntarily took on the massive chore of editing this sucker with astounding thoroughness, and then after kicking my arse over grammar, proceeded to bring some of my feeble visions to life in brilliant and breathtaking ways. Any mistakes left in this thing are most definitely mine because I erroneously thought they would work better or some such madness.
> 
>  **Art Link:** <http://lsain.tumblr.com/post/162792653092/it-was-a-pleasure-to-work-with-futuredescending>

[ ](http://aesterismos.tumblr.com/post/157153182914/make-like-stars-dying-for-them-is-a-little)

 

_____

 

Roxy forgot to silence her phone last night. The tail-end vagaries of a dream—something about Geordie and JB getting into some vicious canine feud that had rippling effects for not only her friendship with Eggsy but, bizarrely, all of Kingsman—are overwhelmed by the tinny chorus notes of “I am the Walrus” and the shivery rattle of her vibrating mobile on the bedside table.

The patch of white ceiling directly above her bed looks funny, maybe a little swollen, when she opens her eyes, and she can’t quite pin down why. Geordie raises his head from the groove of her hip and makes old man moaning noises at her, brown eyes giving her a baleful look as if she is to blame for rudely interrupting his sleep.

 _It’s not me_ , she wants to say, rubbing a hand down her face and making some old man moaning of her own. With a mighty coalescence of effort in the battle against fatigue, she twists to stretch across the distance of the mattress and fetches her phone, yanking the power cord from its port, and hitting the accept button with her thumb before smacking it against the side of her face. “You are aware there’s such a thing as time zone differences, Eggs?”

The long pause on the other end is decidedly sheepish. “Er, right. Sorry.”

She loves that boy, but it’s not the first time she wants to smack him upside the head for his occasional obliviousness. Instead, she consciously takes a deep breath and plies her most patient tone. “So what’s up? And why are you ringing me anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be on a mission right now?”

He’s in China, she remembers, trailing some business tycoon who had suspected ties to Valentine, but apparently didn’t go so far as to allow himself to be chipped.

“Yeah, ‘bout that. I’m currently tailing my mark and I’ve got to look like I’m busy talking on the phone.” Now that he mentions it, she can faintly hear the sounds of some sort of inoffencive harp playing and the muffled clamour of various conversations in the background. A restaurant, she’d bet, a Western-styled one. There’s the occasional faint noise of silverware scraping against dishes and glasses being knocked against each other.

Consigning herself to full awareness with little hope of getting back to sleep, Roxy sits up and glares at her rumpled bedsheets. It’s still dark out, and her body is lethargic. When she glances out the window, she can see a thin line of orange just starting to warm the sky, silhouetting the blocks of flats lining her street. She didn’t want anything bigger when she came into her Kingsman salary, certainly nothing so grand as a whole townhouse like the one Eggsy inherited. “So instead of faking that phone call, you decided to actually call someone eight hours behind you on the one day she can have a lie in.”

“...method acting?”

“How much longer do you need to pretend?”

“That about does it, yep, thanks, Rox!” Eggsy says in one hurried breath before the line goes completely silent and Roxy realises he hung up on her.

She even pulls the phone from her face to confirm the screen went dark. Geordie continues staring at her in that wise, ancient way of his. She leans forward and buries her face in his coarse fur, inhaling his doggy scent. He responds by sniffing at her hair and trying to lick her neck. “I am surrounded by ungrateful monsters,” she tells him.

As if Fate hears her, her glasses start to beep. She privately rewards herself for not screaming in frustration the moment she slips them on. “Yes, Merlin?”

“Lancelot, I apologise for waking you on your day off,” Merlin greets in a manner that doesn’t hold an ounce of contrition. He knows as well as she does that Kingsman agents are always on call.

“Apology not necessary,” she says anyway, because it’s too ingrained in her to be polite. “I’m already up.”

“Good.” Whether he sights through her glasses to take in the interior of her admittedly sparsely-decorated bedroom and the fact she is still very much in bed, she doesn’t know, and they’re not so close as to joke about it the way she’s seen him do with Eggsy. But then, she isn’t keen on finding out just how much he sees through Kingsman’s ubiquitous eyewear. “I’m sending you a list of confirmed deaths at Valentine’s bunker from the UN’s servers. It may seem small at first. As you can imagine, they’re still having trouble IDing some of the bodies.”

Her tablet is covered by a glass of water, a half-eaten sleeve of chocolate digestives, and the book she’s been trying to read past page 40. She hastily shoves them out of the way in order to retrieve it. If Merlin is witnessing the careless abuse of his very expensive tech, he also makes no mention of it this time.

Opening the attachment Merlin sent reveals a list that, in spite of his preface, is still staggeringly long, starting with Richmond Valentine, and ending with the names of foot soldiers she doesn’t know. They were mostly ex-military, mercenaries, or security guards looking for better pay. Cause of death: detonated chip implant, which reads a lot cleaner than what was actually the case. There’s a few high-profile names she recognises that bring about a stab of disappointment. _I loved her last album_ , she thinks with regret after reading the name of one of her favourite artists. “What am I supposed to be looking for?”

“See anyone missing?”

Rather than point out the impossibility of the question, Roxy dutifully does her best to scan the list more closely. Maybe it’s too early in the morning, but she’s clearly missing something Merlin thinks is obvious. “Friendly reminder I was being plunged to earth from the horrifying edges of the stratosphere and not actually in Valentine’s bunker at the time of any of these deaths?”

She can practically feel Merlin’s thousand-yard stare burning across the distance from Hertfordshire. “It seems our missing person is Valentine’s righthand woman and bodyguard. She and Eggsy had engaged in hand to, er, foot combat until Eggsy managed to take her out with one of our neurotoxin-laced switchblades.”

“Gazelle? Are you certain she isn’t listed under some sort of legal name perhaps?” Roxy frowns as she combs through the list more attentively. “Please tell me her legal name isn’t actually Gazelle.”

“It’s not,” Merlin assures her. “But that’s only because there aren’t any legal records for her existence anywhere to speak of. No birth records. No passport. She wasn’t even on V-Corp’s payroll. And before you ask, I’ve double checked with the coroner’s reports. Nobody fitting Gazelle’s description exists in the morgues. We have visual confirmation of Valentine’s death, but not hers. It’s like her body up and disappeared.”

“Alright,” Roxy gamely says. “A missing body doesn’t exactly rank high on Kingsman’s list of concerns at the moment, though. So what are you really getting at, Merlin?”

“When I learned of the anomaly, I started looking at the list of Valentine’s prisoners who were taken in for medical care post-recovery. Most were examined and released the same day, but some weren’t, including a Jane Doe. No other details were included in the intake.”

She lets her tablet flop back down on the bed. “Are you saying you think Gazelle is still alive?”

“I’m saying the trail ends at a medical facility in Moscow. If Gazelle were somehow still breathing at the time she was taken there, she is most certainly not anymore and I’d rather not have a stolen body used as some sort of martyr for any doomsday fanatics. I need you to go there and find out what happened, one way or another.”

“You don’t want Eggsy to know, do you.” It’s not a question. She doesn’t know how she knows it, but she’s almost positive it’s true. Maybe it’s the way Merlin waited until Eggsy was halfway around the world to bring her in on this.

She hears Merlin sigh in exasperation, but she won’t apologise. If she has to keep secrets, she’d like an inkling as to whom she is keeping them from and why. “I’d just rather wait until we have confirmation of what’s happened first. It’s a sore subject for him. If there’s even a hint of uncertainty….”

“He’ll want to do nothing but hunt her down,” Roxy concludes, a sinking feeling settling into a hard, rock-like weight in the pit of her stomach. “He’ll be driven by vengeance....” Which isn’t always a bad thing: they only have to look at Eggsy’s stellar work on V-Day to know that. However, this would different, less of a world imperative and more of the two-graves mode of revenge.

“Exactly, which is why I need someone with more distance on this.” Taking her understanding as agreement, Merlin adds, “It would be best if you leave this afternoon. I’ll send a taxi round thirteen hundred hours and have your briefing ready within the next thirty minutes. It shouldn’t require anything in-depth; this is a fact-finding mission only. Understood?”

It will never be, _Do you agree?_ Not since she looked her dog in the eye and willingly pulled the trigger in his painfully simple, trusting face. “Understood, Merlin.”

And there goes her day off. Roxy peels off her glasses and tosses them onto the mattress next to her tablet. Geordie gives them a tentative sniff, but upon discovering they are neither food nor interesting toys, his head sinks back down on his paws to return to his nap. How she envied him sometimes.

Her mind turns to the new assignment dropped into her lap and its troubling implications. Something doesn’t sit right with her about it, not the least because of the twinges of guilt over hiding something from Eggsy. But there are too many questions and seeming impossibilities, starting with the one of Gazelle’s survival, if indeed that were the case, and ending with: dead or alive, where the bloody hell did she go, who absconded with her, and, above all, why?

 

_____

 

“Can you check it one more time? Please?” She punctuates her overeager I-Just-Learned-Russian-From-Duolingo accent with the sweetest smile she can dredge up, wondering if it looks as fake as it feels. It’s one she practised in the mirror many times, a mixture of toothless sweetness and embarrassment with some stubborn insistence thrown in. Ali once called it the smile that could charm the devil off his throne.

Combined with the UN badge clipped to the lapel of her suit jacket, it works a treat here too. The receptionist turns back to the computer and re-enters every bit of searchable data Roxy gave her, which, granted, isn’t much, and tries again. “Again, nothing. We don’t have anyone here who matches your description. All of our V-Day patients have been released. I’m sorry I cannot help you.” The clipped notes of her tone tell Roxy she won’t entertain a third request.

It’s not that Roxy is surprised, exactly, by this turn of events. She’s more disappointed that she even carried such a small flame of hope to begin with: that this would be a simple open and shut case they could all quickly put behind them like a tense family dinner.

“Thank you anyway,” she says, smile still kept firmly in place until she turns and walks away.

It’s one of the more underfunded hospitals in Moscow with flickering lights and dingy linoleum tiles that would never truly shine no matter how often they were cleaned. V-Day came and went, leaving it a little more worse for wear. There are scorch marks still on the walls and boarded up windows where panes of glass used to be. Less furniture embellishes the waiting rooms, and much of what remains is broken or damaged. In other words, it’s the perfect place to seek out necessary medical help without drawing much attention.

Her gaze darts to the corner of the room, staring directly into the eye of a CCTV camera.

Instead of walking out the front exit, she glances back at the intake desk. The receptionist is already engaged with other matters. Roxy slips down the corridor to her right. It takes some time to find the door marked _Security_ , barred from access by an ID reader and keypad. She pounds on the door and waits, trying to feign as much panic as possible without attracting attention from anyone passing by.

She mentally counts the seconds it takes for the sleepy guard on duty to startle awake, understand what’s happening, and hastily check the relevant camera before the door cracks open and he pokes his head out in concern.

His lips, already parted in an attempt to voice an inquiry, curve into an ‘O’ of surprise when she shoots one of her watch’s darts into his neck and shoves them both into the security room, shutting the door behind her.

The guard, a middle-aged, thickset man, slips from her feeble grip and tips backwards in the opposite direction, going down heavy like a felled tree. Roxy winces. Fortunately, he strikes the ground shoulder first, which, while not great for his scapula, wasn’t his skull. Giving him a silent apology, she navigates around the island of his body and takes up his seat before the bank of monitors, trying to pull up the recordings from the day after V-Day, and thanking whatever higher powers existed that the hospital’s security systems were upgraded from analog.

Except, the record doesn’t exist.

“Bugger.” She abruptly rescinds her gratitude, sinking back into the well-worn grooves of the chair and staring at the Russian equivalent of a _Record Not Found_ message as if she could will it to transform into what she needs.

Over the comms, Merlin tries for a light note for all of a millisecond before it falls right back into his usual brand of dour cynicism. “I don’t suppose the cameras weren’t simply damaged from V-Day?”

“How much do you want to bet?” Just to be sure, she searches through the bookending records, only to learn at least a whole bloody week was erased, starting from a few days before V-Day, as if whoever charged with getting rid of the evidence saw fit to do a hack job of it at best. The records don’t start back up again until two weeks later.

“Well,” Merlin says. “It seems we’ve a bit of problem on our hands.”

Whatever they inadvertently stumbled upon, it’s turning out to be rather more complicated than initially assumed.

 

_____

 

The heater in her hotel room groans, intermittently releasing a few inexplicable metallic clangs as a weak trickle of lukewarm air seeps from its vents and does very little to heat up the room. Roxy gives up on making the thing spit out anything hotter via judicious application of her fist and pulls the sleeves of her jumper up over her stiff fingers before tucking her hands between her arms and ribs. The air is at least a marginal improvement from an hour ago when she first came in and could see her breath.

The rest of the room bears the telltale hallmarks of its low-budget pricing with only the barest of amenities: a single bed with not nearly enough blankets, a toilet, a tiny rusted sink, and a small shower stall that only released water between the hours of six and eight am, all in the same room with no division. Someone had tethered an old behemoth television to the small ledge in the corner. It aired precisely four fuzzy State-owned channels.

If she expected her high-flying Kingsman life to consist of fancy five-star hotels, room service, and luxury bathtubs big enough to fit six people at once, she would be gravely disappointed.

Instead, she drinks bottles of Baltika 6 Porter and picks at the mystery meat sandwich from Kopeika with disinterest while gazing out at the wave-particle city lights through the small grimy window. Every city holds the same quality of stillness at this time of night, she learned. Quietly anticipatory, like holding one’s breath or lying in wait. A slumbering beast that is about to awake.

Being on one’s own like this, a stranger in a strange land, would make anyone else feel lonely, she supposes, but she doesn’t feel anything noticeably different about herself now. Maybe it’s because growing up she never felt particularly attached to any one place—not to her childhood home, her public school dormitory, nor uni. Not even to her first flat in central London.

She belongs to nowhere, equally.

 _Resilient Roxy_ , her father liked to say when he was feeling charitable. _Stubborn, ungrateful brat_ , when he wasn’t, which was most of the time.

Both he and her mother made it through V-Day just fine. They didn’t have Valentine’s SIM cards and long ago decamped to the pastoral beauty of the Cotswolds where there were acres of land between them and their closest neighbour. After V-Day, she phoned to make sure, though. So isolated and luddite, they didn’t even realise anything happened, which was just as well.

She knows others would look upon their blissful ignorance with envy. Certainly a good number of them were at Kingsman, especially once the dust settled and they tallied up their turncoats and victims. For the Table: two agents turned up with missing heads, two other agents killed in action amidst all the signal-induced violence, and three still remained critically injured.

 _Home doesn’t have to be a place_ , Ali once told her. _Home can be found through surrounding yourself with the right people_.

 _Does that explain...that one?_ Roxy had asked, arching a brow and nodding her head to the off-key singing floating in from his kitchen.

Ali had remained completely straight faced. _There’s no good explanation for that one_.

There’s a perceptible tension to the agency these days that is new and unsettling. Even though she hasn’t been there long, she could feel and know the difference. Chester King irrevocably broke their trust, and as a result, the institution could no longer be trusted, because no institution was bigger than the avarice of the person in charge.

And Merlin is trying. She can see it in the prominent shadows beneath his eyes and the deepening lines of exhaustion on his face. Yet he has so much damage to repair and precious little time in which to do it, she fears even his greatest efforts won’t stem this overwhelming tide of despair. When trust in the institution is lost, there won’t be people who would fight in its name, who would willingly risk dying to defend it, who would be unquestionably loyal to it.

It’s thoughts like these that inevitably make her think of Eggsy. This probably isn’t what Harry meant for him to inherit, but Eggsy’s taken to his new life like a duck to water nonetheless. She supposes when he had to constantly worry about from where his next meal would come and the right words to say to avoid a casual blow to the face, existential crises of faith to an abstract apparatus don’t keep him up at night.

But she also saw Eggsy when he thought no one was looking, the way the light in his eyes dimmed and his gaze turned inward in viciously suppressed grief. She thinks maybe what keeps Eggsy up at night these days is Harry himself, or rather, the loss of him.

 _They_ are all a little bit broken now too.

 

_____

 

“I’m just saying, hacking into hospital records and security cameras to erase all evidence? It’s an awful lot of trouble to go to just to steal a body.”

A lazy flurry besets the afternoon. Tiny snowflakes drift down from the dappled grey sky and immediately melt upon contact with the pavement. They stick around longer on her coat, her hair, and, annoyingly, her Kingsman glasses, giving her a droplet-view of the world.

“I don’t pretend to know the psychology that drives these people to do what they do,” Merlin replies, weariness thinning out his voice into tired resignation. Roxy can picture him rubbing the sore bridge of his nose while the lines around his eyes tighten, the long curve of his hunched back.

The familiar tarnished grey block of the hospital slumps before her, but she’s less interested in going in today than she is in walking the perimeter, sidestepping medical personnel and maintenance workers on smoking breaks while keeping an eye out for the various exits and entrances to the main building itself and, more importantly, any watchful cameras that may have eyes on them. The inadvertent blessings of a surveillance state.

She rounds the back of the hospital and is assaulted by the stench of rubbish piled high in several bins that are in dire need of a dustman, but gamely moves on through the narrow alley anyway—or would have had not two men stepped out to block the end of it, their stony expressions wordlessly threatening.

When she turns around to backtrack, she nearly collides with two more.

They are dressed inconspicuously in the way people do when they need to seamlessly move in and out of shadows and crowds, but there’s no hiding the bulk of hard-earned muscles knitted to their frames nor the equally hard glint in their gaze.

“What is this? What do you want?” Her eyes widen and she backs up a few steps, voice steeped in mounting fear.

“Us? We’re merely concerned citisens,” says a man with a scarred groove slashed across the bridge of his nose, lightly shrugging. “You seem to be very interested in this hospital. Why?”

“I’m from the United Nations. I can show you my badge.” She raises her hands placatingly. “I was just trying to close the file on a few loose ends.”

“A few ends on what?”

Slowly, she moves to her coat as the men around her tense. “Alright, lads?” She pushes the lapel aside to reveal her ID. “There was a victim from V-Day who was taken here. We just want to know what happened to her.”

The man steps in closer to inspect her badge. His flat expression doesn’t change, but it must pass muster, because he only looks up and meets her eyes. “You can go back to your UN and tell them the patient got better.” He pauses, then adds with finality, “She left.”

Roxy gives him a smile, one full of teeth. “Ah, but you see. I don’t think they’ll buy that.”

“No?” The man tilts his head, somehow imbuing the gesture with menace and condescension. “And why is that?”

“Well, for one, I’m not really in their employ.” She relishes the confusion that flashes across his face before she throws her palm into his chin and uses his body to brace herself as she sends a roundhouse kick to his partner’s head.

The momentum of their swing makes him a decent shield as she retrieves the gun from the shoulder holster beneath his open coat and takes out the two at the other end of the alley just as they raise their guns.

It’s also enough time for Scarface to recover and bash his fist into her cheek, knocking her to the wet pavement and sending her stolen weapon skittering across the ground out of reach. Lights flash across her vision, but she catches a movement from the corner of her eye: the other man shaking off his own induced daze to pull out his gun.

She rolls out of the way of Scarface’s incoming kick and wraps her legs around the other man’s neck, twisting and snapping it before ending up on her knees in time to block Scarface’s next kick and aim for what is within perfect striking distance.

The blow to his groin predictably bowls him over with a grunt. She follows up with a swift and sure uppercut to keep him off-kilter as she regains her footing, finishing him off with a spinning hook kick to the back of his skull and following his trajectory down to cleanly sever his spinal cord with the heel of her oxford.

Cold air stings her lungs as she greedily sucks it down. The pounding of her heart gradually begins to fade away, receding to a throbbing ache in her cheek where she was struck.

Over the comms, she hears Merlin sigh. “It’d be nice if, for once, a mission didn’t result in so many bodies lying about.”

“They could have been more accommodating,” Roxy says, bending down to search through their pockets and clean her prints off the gun. Merlin types away in her ear, undoubtedly looking for any cameras that could have captured the scuffle.

“I don’t think the Russians often invite their Western insurgent neighbours in for a cuppa. All clear, no cameras with sight lines into the alley.”

In total, she takes off four mobiles, four wallets, and a set of keys to a Porsche. It won’t look much like a robbery gone wrong upon deeper investigation, but it would be enough of an excuse for an already overtaxed local police force to turn a blind eye. No doubt someone higher up the food chain would come to clean up shop anyway.

“Can we get into these,” Roxy asks, holding up the phones.

“It would be faster if you used my skeleton key,” Merlin pointedly reminds her, though he can’t see the roll of her eyes.

She retrieves a small, thin drive from her oxford’s heel ( _We used to keep our phones in there_ ,Ali once informed her. _Back then, they were approximately the size of a small Pomeranian. Imagine that._ ) and connects it to Scarface’s mobile first, watching the screen come to life seemingly of its own volition as Merlin goes to work, cracking the mobile’s password in the blink of an eye.

Once in, she pulls up a list of recent calls for Merlin to track down, then the text messages, which are mostly vague and seemingly uninteresting until—

“This address.” Roxy holds up the phone, pointing it out on the screen. “Someone’s told him to bring the package here two weeks after V-Day. It fits our window. Is it—?”

“Pulling up satellite images…looks to be a condemned office block in Zamoskvarechye District. Most of the surrounding streets are under construction.”

“So not the worst place in the world to run an FSB black site within the city.”

“Not as such, no,” Merlin reluctantly agrees.

“Then that’s where I need to go next.”

“Due diligence first, Lancelot. Quickly now.”

Roxy grits her teeth and swallows down her frustration. Every instinct is telling her she’s right about this one, but Merlin has a point too. One must be thorough.

She continues her walkabout with more haste, ditching phones and emptied wallets across several already brimming bins while keeping her eyes peeled for unblinking black lenses above.

There’s one at the corner of the hospital’s northeast exit that could have potentially picked something up, which she points out to Merlin and fidgets in the bone-chilling cold while she waits for him to hack into the city’s traffic servers to scrub through the video.

“Got you,” he says at long last with an air of satisfaction. “Streaming to your glasses now.”

Her view of the drab landscape of Stalinist buildings is washed over by the grainy black and white footage: a bird’s eye view of the carpark next to which she currently stands. For several seconds, nothing of note happens as the timecode of passing frames ticks by. But then, a black van enters the frame. It’s hard to see with the scope of the camera broad enough to encompass the whole lot, but the vehicle stops just in front of the exit at the bottom corner of the frame. Tiny figures burst through the door, lugging something sheet-covered and suspiciously body-shaped between them.

“The timestamp of the recording matches the text message. Is that not enough confirmation?” She rocks back and forth on her feet, hands jammed into her coat pockets as she keeps a watchful eye on her surroundings lest more men show up sooner rather than later.

“Alright,” Merlin says with an audible amount of reticence. “Head over there but keep out of sight. Remember, it’s still a fact-finding mission only.”

“Understood.” She holds up the car keys she took off Scarface and can’t help the eager grin that spreads across her lips as she presses the unlock button, hearing the answering chirp across the lot. “I believe that’s my ride.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you haven’t picked up Eggsy’s bad habits after all,” Merlin mutters.

 

_____

 

 _A condemned office block_ both overstates and understates the area. Everything is derelict and empty thanks to the long-time residents being pushed out by decree of the Kremlin. The entire area has stood neglected ever since: structures that were once houses, shops, restaurants, and commercial offices. Several buildings, many of which would have been considered historic, were demolished already, making the streets look like big aching gaps in a row of teeth.

Roxy left the flashy Porsche several blocks back and now covers the rest of the distance on foot. She hasn’t learned the fine art of carefree strutting like Eggsy though: her footsteps seem loud and clumsy. There’s an involuntary wave of anxiety at being the only one walking along the uneven pavement, not even another pedestrian or car about. Though the area may have been purposely shed of its surveillance, caution—or paranoia—makes her worry someone is watching her every move.

“Coming up at your two o’clock,” Merlin says just as she reaches the end of the street.

Her steps slow until she’s pressed against the side of an empty grocer’s, peering around it. The old building is only one storey, concrete and featureless, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire. Certainly a setup that wouldn’t normally go hand in hand with a construction site.

“Let’s get a read, shall we?” With a tap on her glasses, the clear panes darken into a thermal scan, and the seemingly cold, lonely world lights up like Christmas.

Nine of them are distributed unevenly across the two floors in wavering blobs of reddish orange, some stationary in a manner that would suggest they are guards. What concerns her the most are how three of them are situated within one room, two circling a still, slumped figure like sharks.

“Reconnaissance only,” Merlin says again in a measured tone, timely as ever.

“Eight on one aren’t bad odds,” Roxy finds herself saying under her breath, her pulse picking up in a rush of painful thuds as she shrugs the coat from her shoulders. “We could never have another chance like this again, Merlin. The FSB will have caught onto my presence by now. They’re probably heading here as we speak. If we don’t act today, they’ll disappear forever and we’ll never know what happened.”

“Lancelot, _no_ , you’re to stand down. It’s not worth it. You’d be running half-cocked into a situation with no preparation or research. I don’t even have eyes in the building should anything go wrong! Don’t do something reckless—Lancelot!”

“I’m sorry, Merlin,” she says, already moving across the road. “But I’m making the call.” It’s the last thing she says before muting him.

It’s not so easy to scale the sheer face of a wall in dress shoes as it is in trainers—a key difference between the Kingsman recruit trials and reality—but then, trainers don’t really round out a sophisticated suit in the same way. She finally clears the top with only minor scratches across her hands and a reminder to suggest they really ought to invest in soles with a bit more grip.

Dropping down to the other side and keeping low to the ground, she pauses to get a better lay of the land:

Six on the ground floor positioned on or circulating around the exits.

Two upstairs, all likely armed with standard Russian sidearms and assault rifles, if the way the guards are holding their arms slightly akimbo are any indication.

She didn’t come prepared for an infiltration. Better to use stealth where and when she can.

She swiftly takes out the first guard who arrives to investigate the sound of breaking glass from the window she kicks in and adds the Spetsnaz ballistic knife lifted from his belt to her personal inventory. Guards two and three fall under her new knife’s blade, throats silently slit with nary a sound but for the vaguely nauseating wet gurgle of blood.

It’s when she gets to number four that things go pear-shaped. He must see the spreading pool of crimson first because his rifle is up and spraying the wall with bullets before she can barely duck out of the way.

“Shit!” She trades the knife for her Kingsman sidearm, flicking the safety off. When there’s a pause in the hail of bullets, she pops up and plugs two of her own into the trigger-happy guard’s chest, then ducks back down behind a large wooden desk to miss the return volley from the other two, no, _three_ men now present. One came down from the first floor.

With her protection soon to be rendered into little more than splinters, she rolls out across the floor, shooting one guard’s ankles and effectively bringing his head into range when he collapses, his cries cut short with a bullet to the skull. Her momentum takes her to the meagre protection of a supporting pillar for a brief moment of respite.

Two more, one still upstairs. Five bullets and two shotgun cartridges left. Spare mag in her pocket, provided she can find the time to change it out.

Breathe in. Out.

She pushes away from the pillar and immediately feels the barrage of bullets across her torso. Her suit stops them all, but it _hurts_ , like a hundred stones pelting her at 3000 kph. It certainly provides her with enough impetus to _end it_ , first with a well-placed bullet through the forehead of one guard, then two shots to centre mass of another, but then the third, one of the largest men she’s ever seen, the one who came from upstairs, is too close, backfisting her with enough force to send her flying across the room.

Before Roxy can raise her gun, he’s on her, a massive weight, batting the gun away and flipping her onto her back with an angry swipe of his paw. He’s sweating, his face red with fury, dark eyes ablaze with murderous rage. He reaches down with his big hands, planting one across her forehead and grabbing her tie with the other, winding it several times around his knuckles and yanking it into a noose.

“You like that? Like that, bitch? You can choke on it!”

The vice around her neck sends her into an instinctive panic, mouth falling open, gagging, vainly trying to _breathe._ Her fingers automatically scrabble for the material, gouging her skin in vain attempts to pry the material just a little looser, but it only grows more constricting when he twists it tighter, his fist shaking as the silk becomes an unforgiving rope that cuts into her throat.

With one last desperate burst of oxygen in her dying brain, she remembers the knife.

Her fingers fumble over the handle as she draws it from her holster, twitching her finger over the small trigger along its side to send the slender blade shooting up through his carotid and using the last of her energy to shove his stiffening body away before he can crush her.

She rolls onto her side and rips the tie from her abused throat, gasping and coughing, unable to do little more than a dying fish impression on the floor.

She’s exhausted, dangerously light headed. Black dots swim around her dimmed vision. Her glasses were knocked off her face somewhere in the fray, but she can see her fallen gun lying just metres away.

There’s still one more.

No one else emerges as she slowly climbs the steps, gun up and poised to shoot anything that moves. The first floor landing consists of a long corridor with several doors, but only one of them is open, casting a wide swath of light across the ground. She cautiously approaches the entryway, dares to step through it.

It’s a brutish, bare cement block of a room without heat. The windows are boarded up. The stark light comes from an overhanging bulb missing its diffusing glass cover. 

And there at the centre is a woman Roxy has never laid eyes on in person, has only seen through Eggsy’s recordings of his time in Valentine’s bunker and heard about through his wavering voice late at night when they both couldn’t sleep.

Gazelle.


	2. Chapter 2

She remembers how vicious Gazelle was in Eggsy’s recordings, a tightly coiled panther with impossibly fast reflexes and dark eyes that were flat and joyless for everything but for the thrill of the hunt. Eggsy admitted he only walked away from that fight due to luck more than skill.

What is here in the room with her now is some diminished form of that woman, strapped to a solid steel chair, small and frail, dressed in a sack-like garb that bears wet crimson stains. Those intimidating bladed feet are gone, calves now simply hanging as stumps over the seat. Only one wrist is tied down because her other hand and forearm are entirely missing.

She glances up at Roxy’s arrival, a wan, battered face peering out through a ragged mat of hair, dark bruises beneath her eyes, a rivulet of dried, flaking blood curving from her nose to the corner of her gagged mouth.

They hold each other’s gaze for seemingly countless moments, and then Gazelle’s eyes dart slightly to the left.

Roxy pivots and fires her gun twice, chest and head. The last guard’s—no, _interrogator_ ’s—head whips back with the force of a close-range bullet pitted right between his eyes, leaving a spray of blood and brain matter on the wall behind him. His body falls backwards. His knife, the one he would have used to silently slit her throat, clatters to the ground beside him.

Holstering her gun and retrieving the fallen knife, she moves towards Gazelle, bringing it up to her face. Gazelle flinches like she can’t help herself, but Roxy just cuts away the gag. She soon recovers her composure, staring up at Roxy with a preternatural calm, as if she hasn’t been tied up and tortured for what was likely months by now.

“Are you supposed to be my knight in shining pinstripe?” Her hoarse voice is thickly accented; Roxy had never heard her speak at length before. A slow assessing gaze scans the length of Roxy’s body, missing nothing. The final conclusion becomes obvious in the flat line of her mouth. “You look worse than me.”

“How are you still alive?” Roxy croaks out. Gazelle isn’t wrong. Her throat is already starting to swell shut.

“Bad luck.” She rotates her right shoulder, calling attention to the arm that ended just below her elbow.

Before Roxy can reply, a muffled commotion rises up from the ground floor: men shouting, guns being readied with bullets—many of them. The reinforcements arrived even sooner than expected.

Gazelle stares at Roxy point blank. “Looks like there is a lot of that about.” Sitting back in the chair, her expression infuriatingly slides into something akin to faint amusement. “How did you think this rescue was going to go again?”

“You could take this a bit more seriously. It’s your life on the line too.”

But Gazelle seems unbothered by the prospect. “Oh, they’re not going to kill me.” And after Roxy’s eyes very pointedly roam over her bound figure, she adds, “I have something they want.”

“And what’s that?”

Gazelle arches a brow. “The only existing copy of the research on Valentine’s SIM cards.”

Roxy narrows her eyes, trying to ascertain the truth of her words, but she suspects butter wouldn’t melt in Gazelle’s mouth.

“He didn’t keep digital copies of anything important.” Gazelle shrugs.

“In exchange for getting you out of here, will you give it to us?”

“I’ll think about it,” Gazelle says. The nerve.

Boots stomping across the floorboards herald the imminent arrival of more men. Roxy’s on her last 10 bullets, two shotgun cartridges, the knife (basic military grade), and, after checking the body on the floor, a beautiful SPS pistol with 18 rounds, which she pockets along with its spare mag.

It’s still not enough, not nearly.

When she’s finished her assessment, she points her gun back at Gazelle, fearing she’s giving away too much of her dismay already. “Or I can make this a lot easier for us all and just kill you now.”

Gazelle doesn’t bat an eye, instead leaning forward to press her forehead against the muzzle of Roxy’s gun. “I’m not the only one who knows about the research. I guarantee you that person is already working to get it. Kill me now or leave me here, and you will never find out.”

It is, as Eggsy would say, a clusterfuck of a situation. Roxy grinds her teeth in frustration and moves towards the boarded up windows, trying to see if the wood can be pried off, but the planks are all nailed in several times over. She swears under her breath.

“You won’t be able to get out of this room except the way you came in,” Gazelle drawls, but Roxy can hear the increased strain beneath her tone. “They are coming.”

With a deep breath to centre herself, Roxy turns and grabs the back of Gazelle’s chair, tipping it on its hind legs and tugging it towards the door.

“You’re not going to untie me?” For the first time, there’s a crack in Gazelle’s demeanour, something bordering on outrage and disbelief, and Roxy isn’t above relishing in it.

“No, I think I rather prefer you like this.”

Roxy steps out into the hall and immediately starts shooting, one bullet per guard. She takes out three of them in one pass and uses the respite she gets when the rest duck into the side rooms for cover to progress a few more metres forward, dragging her burden behind her.

“You would have me as a sitting duck like this?” Gazelle shouts over her shoulder.

“You said it yourself: they don’t want to kill you,” Roxy replies as she suddenly swings Gazelle’s chair out in front of her to use as a human shield just as the men regroup.

“Cease fire, cease fire!” one of them frantically barks out when he spots Gazelle.

Roxy happily takes advantage of their confusion to shoot the man blocking the doorway of the room closest to her before pulling Gazelle into it, slamming the door and wedging the back of the chair beneath the handle, bless its sturdy construction.

“C’est vraiment des conneries!” Gazelle spits in her face.

“It worked, did it not?” Roxy says lightly as she uses the knife to cut the rest of Gazelle’s bindings.

“And now you’ve trapped us in yet another room. You think this chair is going to hold them off for long?” As if in answer, the pounding begins, shaking the whole door and almost jostling Gazelle off the chair now that she’s no longer secured to it.

“They’re not going to shoot through the walls and risk hitting you. And I only need to buy us enough time to do this.” Roxy empties the rest of her bullets through the glass windows before turning back to Gazelle and realising this next part isn’t going to be very dignified. “I suppose you’ll have to….” She waves her arms and turns her back to mime the rest.

Gazelle gives her a withering stare as she reaches up to wrap her one arm around Roxy’s shoulders and wind her thighs around Roxy’s waist. Despite how long she’s been here and how worn down she appears, there is still a core strength within her frame that clings securely around Roxy’s, a byproduct of what has to be years of rigourous conditioning.

There’s little time to contemplate the matter further as the door is kicked open behind them.

Roxy takes off at a run towards the open window, feeling a little sick at even this height. Praying her calculations are correct, she takes her leap of faith, twisting as much as she can with another human being attached to her back to fire the SPS behind her and watching four more men go down before gravity wrestles her back under its control.

She’s vindicated to see the lorry filled with sand rushing up to meet her. The impact, softer than pavement but still hideously unforgiving, breaks Gazelle and her apart like dandelion seeds.

For a few precious seconds, Roxy tries to catch her breath, rattled bones aching. “Honestly, that seemed easier in films.”

The respite doesn’t last long when bullets start raining from the sky, limited to the circumference around her as Gazelle frantically increases the distance between them, kicking up sand in her wake.

“Stay put!” Roxy shouts and tries to stand, only to end up clumsily falling back on her arse when her foot simply sinks deeper into the unstable mound beneath her feet. She finally manages to roll off the lorry, landing in a graceless sprawl on the ground, but at least the metal siding better shields her from the continued spray of bullets in her direction.

They’ve made it out of the building, but there’s still a concrete wall and several blocks between them and their escape vehicle, and not enough ammo left to cover a tedious, haphazard retreat by foot.

_What would Eggsy do under such absurdly terrible odds?_

Then Roxy looks up at the lorry and thinks, _I’m so glad this isn’t being recorded_. The dramatics of everything that played out thus far are embarrassing enough.

She climbs into the cab and has to sit at the edge of the seat to reach the accelerator. After popping the visor, the keys slide into her lap.

Gazelle appears in the side mirror, hanging over the bed. “What are you doing?”

“Best hang onto something!” Roxy calls out as she slots the key into the ignition and turns the engine with a silent prayer, nearly crying in relief when it sputters to life after a few hairy seconds.

She scoots forward even more to floor the gas, spurring the lorry into action as she charges it straight for the wall ahead. In the last moment before impact, she squeezes her eyes shut and grips the wheel until her knuckles turn white.

The impact is deafening, and would have propelled her back into her seat had she not had a deathgrip on the wheel. Her eyes fly open when the bonnet wrenches inwards with an ear-piercing screech of metal. Exploding chunks of wall hurdle towards the windscreen, creating a web of alarming cracks across the pane, though the glass manages to hold together. Dust turns the air murky as the lorry rides over the rubble, jarring badly enough to throw her sideways against the door.

And then they are free, back on relatively smooth blacktop once more.

Roxy settles into as comfortable a position as she can, sticking her head out the window. “Still there?”

Gazelle’s head pops back over the side, now covered in grey cement powder and sand, looking not unlike an disgruntled, unearthed mummy. “Really?”

Roxy laughs, only a little hysterical, and turns her eyes back to the road.

They almost make it to where Roxy left the Porsche when the others catch up, announcing themselves with the rumble of three black SUVs and a renewed greeting of heavy firepower. Roxy cuts the wheel sharply to the left, sending the lorry skidding sideways. It wobbles and almost overturns before finally shuddering to a stop, doing a decent job of blocking the entire span of the road.

Amidst the loud pings of bullets bouncing off the metal sides, she scrambles out the passenger door and glances back up at Gazelle. “Come on, hurry up!”

There’s a moment where she thinks she’ll have to plead with her, but Gazelle just slides her legs over the side of the lorry and leaps into her arms. Roxy stumbles but manages to stay on her feet, swinging Gazelle up into a fireman’s carry, which Gazelle helps her do by using her loosened bun as a handhold. “Fucking hell! Must you really?”

“Just trying to get comfortable,” comes the unapologetic reply.

She carries Gazelle to the Porsche, practically stuffing her into the driver’s side and making her crawl across the stick shift before hopping behind the wheel herself to get them the hell out of there.

It doesn’t, unfortunately, take the Russians long to find a detour around her impromptu roadblock and soon they fall into line right behind them, guns blazing, bullets peppering their car and pockmarking the windscreens.

Gazelle turns to her. “Give me your gun.”

“I’m not giving you a weapon.”

Gazelle glares at her, then simply turns and pulls open the hatch to the Porsche's boot.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Roxy asks in alarm, having to split her attention between weaving the car across the lanes of the road to avoid the worst of the bullets and the dangerous woman sitting next to her, months of torture or no. 

“Relax, I’m not going to kill the one person who can reach the pedals of the car,” Gazelle says, the entire upper half of her practically in the boot now. After a few more moments of rustling, she emerges with an honest to god rocket launcher.

“...What the fuck?” is all Roxy can say because she can’t for the life of her think of anything else beyond, _How is this my life?_

“This is an FSB car, no? Russia always likes to be prepared,” Gazelle says approvingly. “Just focus on getting us out of here.”

Despite her words, Roxy can’t help but watch as Gazelle somehow readies the weapon, positioning it snugly beneath her arm atop of the seats in confident, fluid motions despite missing three quarters of her extremities. 

With the squeeze of the trigger, the projectile shoots out the back screen of the car in a shower of glass, sailing across the short distance in a smoking arc to the vehicle behind them.

The force from the explosion causes the Porsche to fishtail, blowing Gazelle back against the dash.

By the time Roxy straightens them out again and checks the rearview mirror, they’re no longer being pursued.

 

_____

 

“I know you must be furious,” Roxy begins as soon as Merlin picks up.

“I’m not furious.” Merlin’s voice is suspiciously serene in a particularly worrying way. “Furious is when Galahad goes through twenty lighters in two weeks or Tristan keeps misplacing his glasses. What I am, Lancelot, is _incandescent_. Do you know what that word means? It’s my Calendar Word of the Day.”

Roxy blinks and opens her mouth to speak, but is promptly cut off.

“It means ‘white, glowing, or luminous with intense heat.’ Or, ‘strikingly bright, radiant, or clear.’”

Unbidden, an image of Merlin’s bald head glowing like a lightbulb comes to mind. “Merlin, I’m—”

“Or,” Merlin continues, “‘marked by brilliance, especially of expression’. Or, ‘characterised by glowing zeal’. So, I am incandescent, Lancelot. Very much so. With _rage_.”

The word hangs between them, chilling her more than the frigid air of the safehouse. In the reflection of the window, Roxy keeps an eye on Gazelle at the kitchenette table, even though it’s not exactly like she’s mobile. Beneath the unflattering fluorescent lights, she looks even worse, sallow skin painted in sharp contrasts of too-deep hollows. Roxy would mistake her for traumatised had Gazelle not turned those dark, defiant eyes on her and dared her to hold her gaze.

“Gazelle’s alive,” Roxy blurts out.

Merlin’s silence on the other end goes on for so long, Roxy wonders if the connection dropped, but then comes a strangled, “ _How_?”

“I’ve yet to find out. But the Russians were interrogating her for months to get her to divulge the location of Valentine’s SIM card research.”

It takes another few moments to process this information. “And she didn’t break?” 

Roxy studies the _she_ in question, who does a decent impression of not eavesdropping on Roxy’s phone call as she raises her steaming mug and slowly brings it to her lips. Or maybe she truly doesn’t care. It’s difficult to tell. “No. No, I don’t think so.” 

“Well, that’s something gone right for once,” Merlin mutters, voice muffled in the way it does when he’s running a hand over his face. “Look, keep her contained until the backup team arrives. We’ll transport her to headquarters for interrogation and—”

“What?” Roxy can’t help the incredulity from bleeding into her tone. “Did you not hear the part where I said she hasn’t broken yet?”

“And she has yet to experience _our_ methods,” Merlin says patiently. “Trust me, they’ve been one hundred percent successful so far.”

She doesn’t quite work up a shudder at the thought of what methods Kingsman had to extract information from an unwilling participant, but it’s a near thing, and the uneasy feeling stays in her stomach long after.

Yet the thought of having taken Gazelle out of one hell hole only to throw her to Kingsman’s mercies feels...wrong. Like bad faith, which is a ridiculous notion as Gazelle is the enemy: a mass murderer who, lest one could forget, actively tried to decimate the world’s population not so long ago.

“Yes, Merlin,” Roxy says to both him and herself.

“They should be on the ground in six hours. Will you be alright with her on your own?”

She glances at Gazelle again. “Of course.”

“Good. Oh, and Lancelot?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t think this gets you off the hook for your earlier insubordination. We will be addressing that upon your return.”

Roxy can count the number of times she was ever deserving of a reprimand on one hand. Just the mention of it has her swallowing back a sudden influx of bile at the back of her throat. “Understood.”

When she ends the call and tosses her phone on the table, Gazelle cants her head, appraising. “So now your men will come and take me away to _your_ windowless room this time.”

“You can make this much easier on yourself and just tell us what we need to know. They’ll have no choice but to turn you over to the Hague after. You’ll be treated humanely.”

Gazelle scoffs. “Whereas Kingsman’s hospitality is anything but. What does that say about you?”

It says something Roxy would rather not examine too closely. “You’re hardly in a position to lecture me about ethics.” She tries to busy herself with locating the first aid kit beneath the sink, movements brisk with annoyance. “We should get you cleaned up.”

Roxy carries Gazelle to the bath, helping her to sit on the edge of the tub in and cutting away the soiled scrap of garment hanging off her thin frame. At first, all Roxy sees are glimpses of discoloured, mottled skin and the sharp relief of bones, until the last of the coarse fabric falls away and she can take in the full extent of what months of interrogation can do to a body.

There is the shock of Gazelle’s amputated limbs, which is more the expectation of something that is starkly absent: the scars below her knees are old, scars faded and almost worn smooth as tanned leather, but the stump of her right arm is still an angry mass of fresh ridges that haven’t had the chance or nourishment to properly heal.

Her collarbones are thick ridges across her chest, prominent and strong. Her breasts are slight swells over her ribs, buoyed by a blanket of sheer muscle, nipples dark swollen buds. They’re a shocking reminder of Gazelle’s femaleness, when everything else about her has been concertedly honed into pure steel.

There are bruises and welts just about everywhere, but it’s the ones layered across her hips and soft inner thighs like dirty smudges made by careless fingers on a window pane that finally force Roxy to turn away and grip the edge of the ceramic sink.

When she recovers most of her poise, at least enough to turn back, Gazelle only arches a cool brow. “Are you bothered by these?” Her one hand waves across the all too telling bruises before she dismisses them with an air of indifference. “Don’t be. It happens to us in our line of work. You’ll soon see for yourself.”

“Shut up,” Roxy hisses out of reflex. “Just...shut up.”

Aside from the obvious, there are no immediate broken bones, cuts that require stitches, or any internal bleeding Roxy can determine, though she’s hardly a doctor and imagines Gazelle’s pain tolerance to be on a whole other scale from most. Eventually, she deems it safe enough to run a bath.

Gazelle declines Roxy’s help with getting into the water, turning what ought to have been an awkward process into a limber, smooth slide worthy of any acrobat. As the heat of the water sinks into her skin, she sighs and closes her eyes, resting the stump of her arm along the bathtub ledge.

Roxy finds her eyes drawn to it. “Did they amputate it because of the toxin?”

“The flesh up to my elbow was necrotic.” Gazelle doesn’t even open her eyes, her voice as neutral as if she were discussing the weather. “It would have spread to the rest of my body otherwise. It was only to save my life so they could keep questioning me.” 

“It was supposed to be immediately fatal. You should have died within seconds.”

“Maybe your friend did not give me enough. Maybe what he had was bad.” Gazelle opens her eyes and looks up at Roxy. Just beneath the surface of the water, her hair fans around her like a cloud of black ink. “I nearly did, though. I was ill for a long time, then I woke up in that room with the Russians.” At Roxy’s incredulous look, she says, “It would not have been my first choice either.”

If she’s angry about her recent ordeal or the events that precipitated it, Gazelle keeps it well hidden. Her tone remains clinical, even passive to such cruel whims of fate. Roxy looks away first and feels the dull, deep ache of her own injuries clamouring for their due. “Will you be alright on your own for a bit?”

Gazelle just gives her a look more telling than any spoken word.

Roxy leaves her to it, moving to the tiny bedroom and painstakingly shedding the soiled pieces of her suit, now encrusted with dried blood, sand, dirt, and who knows what else. Every movement unearths a new ache, be it a bruise or overstrained muscle and joint. When she looks in the mirror, she sees the polkadot smattering of bruises across both her front and back.

 _We used to count how many bullets we’d taken after every mission. Everyone would buy the winner a drink at the end of the month_ , Ali once told her. _At that point, he’d need it._

And then there’s the nasty business that is her throat. There’s a darkening ring around her neck that almost makes her look like she’s been garrotted. After painfully swallowing down a few anti-inflammatories and changing into a spare set of clothes (they swim on her, thanks to the fact that every option in the safehouse was designed for a larger male’s frame, and wouldn’t that have to start changing soon), she retrieves an ice pack from the freezer, gingerly sits back against the unexpectedly decent bed, and plies the cool weight across her sore throat. 

Once she comes to a standstill, it’s like her body just wants to shut down, limbs growing heavier beneath the weight of gravity, thoughts sinking deeper within herself until they become incoherent whispers. She blinks slowly and tries to note every detail of the ceiling above her, an outdated popcorn one stained with yellow cigarette smoke, but soon even those finer points start to blur into nothing at all.

 

_____

 

Roxy hates dinners at Grandmother’s house. They happen monthly in Norfolk with her entire family, not just her parents but all her aunts, uncles, cousins, and her parents’ aunts, uncles, and cousins too. She has to wear a fancy dress, it’s a long drive up, the house is always dusty, and worst of all, it’s _boring_. But Mortons pride themselves on tradition whether anyone likes them or not (and she knows Mummy doesn’t because she always slips her flask into her purse before they set off), so they all have to go and ‘pay tribute to the matriarch,’ as Daddy liked to say.

This year, the visits are even more unbearable because she’s forbidden from running around in the garden with the other boys. Her aunts say she has to learn to stay put and be a lady, but it’s a load of bollocks, so she protests by hiding away in the little alcove in the back stairwell, the one that only the staff uses. It’s just big enough for her to curl up inside with a book, a stolen plate of sweets, and a pillow from the drawing room. Whenever she hears footsteps coming, she simply switches off her torch and it’s so dark, no one even notices she’s there.

She can hear a lot of conversations through the grate, though, from all over the house, like poor Nanny calling out for her in vain, the kitchen staff preparing the meal, and Mummy and Cousin Ali, who is really her Daddy’s cousin, having it out somewhere away from the others. There’s shouting (from Mummy), crying (also from Mummy), and then quietly murmured words Roxy can’t make out (Cousin Ali).

When she hears the floorboards creak, she hastily shutters her light and holds her breath as footsteps clamber down the stairs, long legs passing by her hidden spot, but when Cousin Ali reaches the bottom of the steps, he only sinks down to sit upon them, shoulders deeply bowed and head hung low.

It’s a sight infused with so much dejection, she can’t help but ask, “Are you sad?”

Cousin Ali’s shoulders stiffen and he twists around to catch sight of her, then shakes his head a little to himself, the way Roxy’s seen Nanny do when she’s tutting someone. “Hello. How long have you been hiding there?”

“A long time. It’s my secret hiding spot.” She’s very proud of herself for having found it, but then she worries. “You mustn’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t,” he promises.

“Why are you here?”

Cousin Ali takes his time in answering. “I suppose I wanted someplace to hide as well, although I can’t quite fit into that little nest you’ve made for yourself.”

“Are you hiding because of the row you had with Mummy?”

He looks taken off guard by that. “How did you—”

“You were very loud. I can hear everything through the vents. What’s a poofter?”

Cousin Ali frowns as something dark passes over his face. “It’s not a very nice word.”

“Then why did Mummy call you that?”

“Because she was angry.”

“Why?”

“Because….” But Cousin Ali never finishes, touching a hand to his lips like he already said something he should not have done. He just closes his mouth and then regards her. “I don’t think you’ll be seeing much of me again, Little Roxy.”

“You’re not going to come for dinner anymore?” Such a thing seems unthinkable. No one gets out.

“No. I’ve been...uninvited.”

“Lucky,” Roxy sighs enviously. “I wish I were uninvited too.”

Cousin Ali laughs, but it doesn’t sound entirely happy. His eyes are still sad, but his smile is warm, if small and funny looking. “Keep that up and maybe when you’re older, you can be.”

 

_____

 

Roxy’s eyes fly open to find Gazelle looming over her, peering down into her face with the expression of a bored cat. She jerks back, then winces at the way every muscle in her body complains over the motion. Something cold and wet is soaking unpleasantly into her shirt. Her leaking ice pack, bloody hell.

“You’re drooling,” Gazelle sees fit to point out.

Hastily wiping the corner of her mouth, Roxy gingerly sits up and tosses the melted pack onto the floor with a wet plop. Gazelle sits on the edge of the bed. At some point, she retrieved the spare clothing from the dresser and is now likewise swimming in an over-large, long-sleeve shirt and trackie bottoms, although she doesn’t have the luxury of being able to roll the legs and sleeves of hers up. The overall effect makes her look contrarily young, despite her hardened, wary eyes.

“What time is it?” Roxy asks, or tries to. Her voice is more rasp than actual words, barely squeezed out.

“You’ve only been asleep for two hours.”

Less than four hours until the Kingsman team arrived then. Roxy rubs away the rest of the bleariness from her eyes and stifles a yawn. “I hadn’t meant to sleep at all.”

“I could have taken your knife and stabbed you in the heart while you were out,” Gazelle says casually.

She tries not to tense up or give much of a reaction at all, but the very thought makes her aghast for having let her guard down in such a foolishly simple way. “I’m ever so grateful you resisted your homicidal urges this one time.”

“You should know it is because I don’t consider you my enemy right now.”

Roxy blinks, wondering if she’s still, in fact, asleep. “...thank you?”

“And I’m willing to tell you where Valentine’s research is, but only you,” Gazelle continues.

Roxy nods, slightly taken aback by the sudden turnabout, but she won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Gazelle really is making the most sensible decision after all. “Alright, I’ll make sure I’m the one who will question you when we get to—”

“No,” Gazelle cuts her off, and Roxy’s jaw clicks shut in surprise. “I will only tell you if you take me there to retrieve it personally. I can assure you it’s the only way you will be able to get it.”

“I…” She refuses to look like a gaping fish, but she’s having trouble finding her words, finally settling on a pathetic, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Gazelle’s lips flatten. Roxy never noticed how vivid her features were until her expression shuts down cold. “Then you will never have it. I survived everything the Russians threw at me and worse. I will die before I break, I promise you.”

Looking at Gazelle now, stubbornly obstinate even when she’s a pale shadow of herself, Roxy believes it. “You said earlier that someone else knows about the research. Who is it?”

Gazelle tips her head in acknowledgment. “Valentine’s silent business partner. He provided the initial capital.”

Quite a lot of it too, Roxy gathers, given that V-Corp never went public as far as she can recall. “Then why wasn’t he part of your genocidal scheme?”

There’s just the slightest twitch at the corner of Gazelle’s mouth. “They had a falling out awhile ago, but unlike relationships, you can’t escape a partner who owns forty-nine percent of your company and refuses to sell. For the most part, Valentine’s partner was content to stay out of the picture so long as his coffers remained full, but he’d been known to interfere in business affairs from time to time. Nothing like a little world cleansing to reclaim your sole corporate ownership.”

“Which ended up working out, in a way, if only exactly the opposite of what Valentine had intended,” Roxy concludes.

“I don’t think V-Corp is much of a valuable holding these days,” Gazelle says wryly. “A sensible businessman would sell.”

“But he isn’t sensible?”

“Not as much as he is ambitious. He knows where Valentine keeps his personal research. He may not want to use it on on a global scale, but he’ll be happy to weaponise it for any bidding governments and other terrorist groups. He’ll stop at nothing to get it if you don’t get it first.”

“And you won’t say anything until I take you there, yes, I’m starting to see where you’re going with this,” Roxy says sourly, hating how she can see every move on the chessboard to box her in and yet can’t see a way out. “There must be something else you want. Something we can actually compromise on.”

“I told you what I want. There is nothing else.”

“How do I even know you’re telling the truth now? Who’s Valentine’s silent business partner? Tell me his name at least.”

“So you can track him and let him lead you to the research himself?” Gazelle scoffs. “You can say I’m lying, but at what cost?”

A bout of restless frustration drives Roxy to her feet; she begins to pace. “Why won’t you just tell us? You lost! You’re only making things worse for yourself by not cooperating.”

“And why should I make it easy for you? I was ready to end the whole world. So what if another man picks up where Valentine left off? Do you really think I will care?”

“Then why did you say you would help us in the first place?” Roxy asks bewilderingly, only belatedly realising how loud her voice is when its echoes ring in her ears.

“Because I’m all out of options!” Gazelle shouts back. “And this is the best hand I’ve got, so I will play it.”

Roxy narrows her eyes. “You think I don’t know you’ll try to double-cross me or escape the first chance you get?”

Gazelle doesn’t deny it. “That’s a bridge we’ll have to cross when we come to it. Right now, the choice is up to you. You can agree to my terms or let your Kingsman masters take me away and watch the world eventually burn.”

Roxy almost starts biting her nails again, a terrible anxious habit she curbed only a few years ago. She wrings her hands instead, at a loss for what she ought to do. She should call Merlin, but she knows what he will say: she needs to obey orders and stick to the plan, to trust that Kingsman will keep the world safe.

Except Kingsman isn’t Kingsman anymore, is it? They’re several agents and a significant percentage of support staff down. They’re spread too thin and they have yet to truly recover from the betrayal of the one person who symbolised everything Kingsman is supposed to be. How easily it all almost fell apart. Even now, it feels as wan and illusory as a dream.

Things were a lot simpler before Eggsy walked off that train with Chester King’s mobile in his hand.

What Roxy does know is this: the woman sitting before her in borrowed oversized clothes formed one half of a pair that almost ended the world in mere minutes. She would not break because she has nothing left to lose.

“I’ll lose my position over this. Or worse,” Roxy whispers. The thought of Merlin looking at her in disappointment makes her sick to her stomach. Of _Eggsy_.

But Gazelle, blasted Devil’s Advocate that she is, puts a stop to the endless trainwreck of endgame scenarios running through her head by leaning forward. “Has that ever been something that would stop you from doing the right thing?”

It’s manipulation, Roxy knows, and she should be angry. She _is_. She’s no one’s puppet or good little girl or ideal lady or perfect daughter.

She’s herself, and no one else’s.

But Gazelle must be rather good at it, because they both already know what Roxy is going to do.

“Kingsman will be here in three and a half hours, if we’re lucky,” Roxy says, trying not to think about how the pain and tightness encircling her throat still feels like a noose of an entirely different sort. “We need to be out in two.”


	3. Chapter 3

There’s no light pollution out in the middle of the Black Sea and the stars are freely scattered like fallen diamonds across the velvet backdrop of a sky. When Roxy dares to lean out over the edge of the cargo ship and tilt her head back, she savours the slight dizziness caused by the gentle swaying, imagines that the roar in her ears isn’t coming from the ship’s engine churning the waters below but from the flaming stars above. She always preferred being on the ground looking up over the reverse.

For as much fretting and hand wringing she has done, to say nothing of the raw nerves that had taken up permanent residence in her stomach during the drive down from Moscow to Sochi in the first qualified car they could hotwire (qualification being that it looked as if it would take its owner at least a few days to bribe the right people in order to track it down), Roxy finds the act of being in transit curiously peaceful. There are no expectations of being here nor there. She’s uncommitted, undefined, liminal. She couldn’t control the ship’s speed any more than she could push a mountain along. They’ll pass through Istanbul whenever the port authority tells them they can, and from there, out into the Mediterranean.

Freight travel isn’t the quickest way to take any journey, but it is one of the cheapest and most obscure, both of which are decidedly helpful if one were to, say, go AWOL on one of the most watchful, technologically advanced agencies in the world with very few resources at one’s disposal whilst aiding an enemy.

Movement from the corner of her eye snaps her attention to her companion. Gazelle has her arm draped over the railing and face tipped up, her olive complexion now limned in moonlight to match her fathomless gaze, her jaw a defined silvered line. She holds herself like a figurehead at the prow of a ship, unfalteringly confident, seemingly at ease even on the ever shifting sea. Gazelle’s new (also stolen) prosthetic feet are fairly generic, a concession for returning her mobility: more wood and plastic than honed, deadly steel, less intimidation and more inconspicuousness. Fitted with a pair of simple black boots, one couldn’t even tell she had prosthetics at all.

Finally, Roxy can’t take it anymore. “Alright, you’ve got me on a ship. We’re well away from land. We’ve only got tinned tomatoes, smoked salmon sticks, and a stale loaf of rye to live on for the next God knows how many days. I’d at least like to know where we’ll end up.”

“When we’re past Istanbul.”

“No,” Roxy says sharply. “Now.”

One brow furrows briefly in irritation at Roxy’s trenchant wilfullness, as if after having had her way thus far, she expected Roxy to simply cede to all her demands without question, but then some of that vexing cool humour filters back into her expression. “Why don’t we play a game.”

“No,” Roxy immediately says.

“I will answer your questions,” Gazelle goes on, undeterred, “if you answer mine.”

Roxy presses her lips tightly together as if she could physically prevent words from slipping out of her mouth.

The reaction makes a corner of Gazelle’s mouth quirk. “It’s going to be a very long few days then.” It’s spoken with the equivalence of a verbal shrug, not quite singsong, but the breezy acceptance of it does as intended: point out the obvious fact they are to share each other’s uneasy company for days to come yet.

Roxy went through enough interrogation training at Kingsman to know this is a bad idea. Never tell them more than they could find out for themselves, if anything at all, was the first and most important lesson. Anything and everything else could be used as a weapon.

Only, she was thoroughly prepared for mallets to kneecaps and fists to her ribs, perhaps pliers taken to her nails and teeth. Not this strange, unknown footing she finds herself carefully navigating now: part antagonism, part camaraderie, part whatever it is one feels for the person one has saved and is charged with taking care of, one way or another.

“What,” she grits out, knowing she has to tread lightly all the same.

Gazelle looks pleased. “What’s your code name?” After witnessing Roxy’s startled expression, she adds, “We were made aware of your quaint little naming scheme when your King Arthur agreed to join us.”

“He’s not our leader anymore.” She only met Chester King once when he brought her in to award her the Lancelot title, still shaky and lightheaded at the thought of having nearly killed her own dog. He had reminded her of her grandfather: an impression of benign gentry whose antiquated thoughts and behaviours one was supposed to take as charming rather than supercilious, his disapproval at suffering a woman within his ranks exposed in the smile that did not reach his eyes. “He paid for what he did.”

“It was through his invite that led you to us, wasn’t it?” Gazelle isn’t the sort to shake her head in disgust, but Roxy can see the way the corners of her mouth turn down to convey a similar sentiment. “I warned Valentine doing so was highly insecure, but we were on an expedited schedule.”

“Pardon me for not expressing my sympathies.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

She weighs the pros and cons of relenting, but if she does her job right, Gazelle will never have the chance to make use of such knowledge anyway. “Lancelot.”

“Like the first one,” Gazelle muses to herself, frowning, before it occurs to her. “You’re his replacement. Explains why you’re so painfully green.”

Roxy gives her a scathing look. She wants to scream, but swallows back the instinctive invective by sheer force of will. “Now answer mine.”

“Algiers.”

Simple, almost underwhelming in its easy admission, enough to make Roxy question whether the price was worth it. She starts to open her mouth again to ask why there when a look from Gazelle makes her snap it shut again.

Satisfied that she now understands, Gazelle asks, “Why did you decide to become a Kingsman?”

Unbidden, Roxy’s fingers reflexively tighten on the metal railing. “Because I wanted to make a real difference in the world.”

Gazelle snorts. “Very stock answer.”

“It’s the truth,” Roxy says, offended despite herself.

“I believe you believe so.”

“Is Valentine’s research in Algiers?” Roxy forges on, refusing to be waylaid by further digressions.

“Yes. What is your real name?”

“Roxanne. Roxy.” It comes easier now, once the tape has been ripped off. “And what’s yours?”

“Gazelle.” There’s no sign of an impending joke to be had.

Roxy frowns. “Your legal name is Gazelle.”

“That’s not what you asked.”

She almost grinds her teeth. “It was implied. Hence, _real_.”

Now Gazelle appears, surprisingly, annoyed. “It is _real_. It may not be the name I was given at birth, but it’s the name I chose for myself and therefore the most real of all.”

“But—”

Gazelle pushes off the railing with a flinty look, mood curtly gone sour. “Game over. No more questions,” she announces before heading back to the cabin.

 

_____

 

Cousin Ali’s look of confusion transforms into one of surprise when he glances down at the little girl on his doorstep. “Roxy, what are you doing here?”

“I decided I don’t want to live with Mummy and Daddy anymore. So can I live with you instead?” Innately, she knows she isn’t supposed to be doing this, but that’s part of the fun. She just desperately hopes he will agree.

Cousin Ali takes one look at the small rucksack she stuffed full of books and snacks, then her determined expression, and sighs, a big one that makes his shoulders sag, before he steps aside and holds the door open for her. “I think you had better come in.”

Now that she knows she won’t be turned away, Roxy feels shy, tentatively stepping into Cousin Ali’s home, wariness making her hesitate, but curiosity ultimately driving her forward.

His home is very _modern_. Roxy doesn’t really understand what the word means, but she heard her parents call him that and knows that the inside of his house looks very different to her own, all dark walls only broken up by the occasional strange framed painting that isn’t of some old dead family member or the pastoral countryside, sometimes even a very large photograph. The rooms aren’t very big, but the scarcity of furniture makes them seem much larger. What furniture is there is made of leather, not floral patterned fabric. In the corner, there’s a baby grand piano that immediately intrigues her.

“Do you play?” she asks him, pointing at it. She knows from having visited various neighbours’ homes they sometimes had things they didn’t know how to use.

“Sometimes.” He takes her heavy rucksack off her shoulders and sits her down on the couch. There’s a sweating glass of amber-coloured alcohol on the side table that she immediately picks up to sniff, only to have it plucked out of her small hands with a look of consternation. “Alright. First thing’s first: how did you get here?”

“I memorised the return address on the Christmas card you sent before Mummy could throw it away. Then I just studied the train timetables and took some money off the maid who steals all of Daddy’s loose notes he leaves in his pockets.” Roxy shrugs. When asked if she was alone, she told the ticket attendant her parents wanted her to practise buying these sorts of things on her own, then pointed at a random couple standing nearby. She lied so smoothly, the attendant had believed her, her charmed expression saying she found Roxy to be adorable rather than the headache her parents constantly told her she was. “It wasn’t hard.”

“Of course it wasn’t.” Cousin Ali rubs his eyes beneath glasses that seem different than the ones he had before. Thicker framed. They make him look old, even though he’s an adult, but somehow _older_. Serious. “And why did you run away in the first place?”

This is more difficult to answer. She chews on a nail and swings her feet against the couch until he stills them with a gentle hand on her knee. “It’s alright. You can tell me anything,” he assures her. “You won’t get in trouble, at least not from me.”

“They’re always telling me I can’t do this or I can’t do that. It’s not proper. That’s not how a lady behaves.” Her features twist up as if to mimic the perpetual pinched expression on Mummy’s face. “It’s bullshit.”

Cousin Ali’s brows nearly disappear into his hair, but he doesn’t chastise her for using a bad word. “What is it you want to do then?”

Confident he won’t be like the others, Roxy says, “Well, I want to be an adventurer and travel all over the world like Indiana Jones! I’m going to find the lost city of Atlantis, and Avalon too. A whip doesn’t seem very practical, though. Maybe some good sturdy rope. And a big sword! And a gun too, but England doesn’t allow handguns so I can only use it on adventures. But when I told Mummy and Daddy, they said I was being ridiculous. I wasn’t. It’s what I want, but they’re always going to tell me no, so I ran away. You’ll let me have adventures, won’t you?”

“Of course I would.” But before Roxy can get her hopes up, Cousin Ali adds, “When you’re _older_. But Roxy, darling, you can’t stay here with me.”

Dismay lashes through her like lightning, sharp and swift, making her almost recoil. She wants to grab her sack and take off again, perhaps to her backup plan: the zoo. “Why not?”

“Well, for one, your parents don’t particularly like me and have legal claim over you. I would be the one in trouble if I tried to prevent them from taking you back. For another, they love you, even if they don’t always act like it.” There it is, that funny, sad smile again. “In fact, they’re probably very worried about you right now. Let’s give them a ring, shall we?”

She remains seated while he goes to his kitchen to fetch the phone. Now that he has sensibly laid out his reasons, she can see he’s right. Even though she had hoped he would dare break the rules for her, she couldn’t remain angry that he hadn’t. Intuitively, she understands it’s different for adults, where breaking the rules is more serious, carries larger punishments. She doesn’t want Cousin Ali to get in trouble because of her. _She_ still likes him.

“Tell you what,” Cousin Ali says when he returns to the living room, phone tucked into his hands even though his legs are tangled up in the cord. “Your parents can’t come and pick you up until tomorrow morning, which means we still have the whole night ahead of us.”

At the time, when she had so little concept of it, the prospect seemed just as good as being able to stay with him forever.

She immediately brightens. “What are we going to do?”

Cousin Ali smiles, a real one. He’s got a sly gleam in his eye that makes him look far more interesting than initial impression would suggest. It’s what she likes most about him, like he is a secret treasure only she is astute enough to recognise. “Well, I think we have enough time for me to teach you the basics of what every aspiring adventurer ought to know….”

Cousin Ali proceeds to teach her about the basics of surviving in the wild: how to find potable water, how to navigate, which plants are edible and which aren’t. He teaches her how to sneak up on an animal upwind by crawling through the grass in the garden using his Doberman, Cecile, as practise. Afterwards, he makes her hot chocolate and serves it with chocolate biscuits. He plays Berlioz on the piano for her before making her brush her teeth for a full two minutes and then tucks her into the guest bed.

Roxy remembers that night well, because it was one of the best nights of her life. 

“I wish I could stay with you,” she declares, though it emerges more as a sigh, eyes struggling to remain open in a futile effort to never let this day end. “Then I won’t have to be a lady when I grow up.”

“If you still feel that way when you grow up,” Cousin Ali says, tenderly brushing the fringe from her forehead. “Then come see me again, alright Little Roxy?”

“Alright,” she agrees, though she doesn’t quite understand what she supposedly agreed to. It just sounds like the right thing to say.

The next morning is every bit as awful as the previous night was wondrous.

Her parents come for her on the first train to London. Her mother screams at Cousin Ali and shouts all sorts of terrible accusations Roxy wouldn’t understand until much later.

And then she won’t see Cousin Ali for a long time, after that.

 

_____

 

The air is lazily hot and has weight to it. There’s nary a cloud in the sky, just a bleached expanse of blue from which the sun beats down. Algiers makes for a beautiful sight when approached from the water, a crop of gleaming white French colonial structures rising from the sea, but Roxy has to admit she isn’t in the right frame of mind to fully appreciate it: she just wants to get her land legs back and eat a decent meal, to be among people who she doesn’t necessarily have to worry will slit her throat in her sleep, to hear the sounds of life instead of half-prickly silences.

Their cargo ship had been large, but not large enough.

Gazelle gives their taxi driver directions with the confidence of a native, surprisingly maintaining desultory conversation about how the city changed in the last ten years throughout the slow crawl through midday traffic, speaking a dialect of Arabic Roxy can’t always understand. Arabic is vocal, passionate, and infused with lilts and guttural exclamations. It’s the most amount of animation she’s ever seen from Gazelle, and the natural, easygoing nature of it is bewildering, like being able to peer into the complex innards that lay behind the face of a simple clock.

They move through block after block of pristine white buildings stamped with tall arched windows and loggias to shade pedestrians from the unrelenting sun, until the modern commercial district gradually tapers off into quieter residential streets. At last, the taxi slows to a stop before one of the larger houses bearing a sign in both Arabic and French that makes Roxy almost choke on her next breath. 

_Richmond House_.

She turns to Gazelle. “What is this place?”

“A children’s shelter. Rare in this part of the world. Orphans usually get taken in by family or fend for themselves.” Gazelle stares at the building like she can see through its walls, her mouth tightened into a straight line. “One of the many, many philanthropy projects Valentine used to manage.” Without another word, she pulls the handle on the door and steps out, leaving Roxy to haggle with the driver over the fare.

“Bit ironic, wanting to help humanity when he was only going to try and wipe most of it off the face of the earth,” Roxy says when she finally catches up to her.

“This place was founded when he still had faith that humans could change,” Gazelle says, shielding her eyes from the sun as she gazes up at its other floors.

“You’re saying Valentine hid his research here. In an orphanage.” Roxy knows her whole face must be painted in scepticism. Her tone is drenched with it, even though she also logically knows Valentine had been rather eccentric, prone to a baffling array of decisions and actions for reasons that eluded Roxy, such as, oh, trying to commit global genocide because of climate change, for one.

“He would only have put it somewhere that meant something,” Gazelle explains, or rather, doesn’t explain much of anything at all.

Before Roxy can pepper Gazelle with another barrage of questions, she starts up the small stone path that winds through the front courtyard, and Roxy has little choice but to follow. The door opens before Gazelle even has a chance to knock, revealing an older woman in a grey jilbāb who studies Gazelle from head to toe, not missing her absent arm or her present feet, and seems to age years in mere seconds.

“Why are you here?” It’s a question spat in equal parts desperation and resignation. The woman’s lightly lined face twists into an emotion lying somewhere between sadness and hatred. “Do you still work for _him_?”

Roxy can’t see Gazelle’s expression, but she can pick up on how the lines of her body stiffen ever so slightly, supple turning brittle.

“There is no _him_ anymore. I only wish to see one of the rooms, Madam Oulmou,” Gazelle says, disarmingly subdued. “I won’t trouble you for long.”

The wariness eases, though doesn’t entirely dissipate. “I could not stop you either way,” Madam Oulmou says, a hint of more heat colouring her words after her initial reticence. “This is your boss’s house. It is I who is trespassing now. There was nowhere else to go.”

“What do you mean?” Gazelle asks in confusion. “This house has always been yours to run.”

“A year ago we were informed Mr Valentine would no longer support the shelter and we were told we had to move out,” Madam Oulmou says flatly, like she expects Gazelle to know this already.

Gazelle doesn’t respond, but whatever Madam Oulmou sees in her face prompts her to add in a tone thick with disgust, “But after V-Day, none of it matters anyway,” before turning away and leaving the door open.

Gazelle doesn’t turn to acknowledge Roxy, just marches stiffly on ahead into the house. Roxy follows close behind, unable to tear her gaze from the sweep of Gazelle’s hair to the rigid line of her spine, at least until they come to a large, airy atrium, bright with sunlight from a wall of windows that overlook the centre courtyard. It’s a beautiful and serene space with ornate tiling on the walls and crisp, white couches adorned with vivid cushions. More wellness retreat than orphanage.

Madam Oulmou leads them across the room and through the courtyard where fruit trees grow in large painted pots. There’s even a fountain, though it looks as if it’s been shut off for some time, dried and cracked in places. It’s quiet here too, with only the sounds of their light footsteps crossing the flagstones.

There’s a broad staircase towards the back of house that leads to the floor above where the children’s bedrooms must be, but the thing niggling at the back of Roxy’s mind gradually manifests as a clear and striking realisation: it’s _too_ quiet. _Too_ clean. If this place is meant to be a children’s shelter, then where are the children? Where is the evidence of their play, the mess they inevitably create? Toys, stains, laughter, fights, tears?

“Are the children in their bedrooms? We are not disturbing?” Roxy asks.

Madam Oulmou stops and turns to regard Roxy for the first time since they arrived, dark eyes boring into her with the merciless assessment of someone who doesn’t have the patience for Roxy’s brand of ignorance. “There are no more children here after V-Day.”

Roxy stops dead in her tracks, the blood in her veins replaced by ice. The expansive rooms grow suffocating, the walls and high ceilings closing in like a tomb. “What?”

But Madam Oulmou is tired, her eyes are utterly _weary_ , a thousand years old, long inured to all of life’s worst nightmares, and Roxy’s reaction means so very little to her now. “The stairs will take you to the upper rooms. You can show yourselves out when you are finished. Please don’t come back.” There’s no smile or reassurance or even a frigid goodbye. She simply dismisses them by turning her back and silently disappearing down another passageway, her shadow on the floor moving like a lonely wanderer doomed to haunt these grounds long after everyone else is gone.

Gazelle didn’t say a word during the entire exchange, and Roxy still can’t see her face as she heads up the stairs at a much faster pace than their previous saunter. Roxy hastens to keep up. It’s a lot of stairs, wide with shallow steps that force her to take two at a time. At the top, Gazelle takes a sharp right, passes four different doors, all closed, and finally pauses before the last corner room.

She lays her hand over the embellished metal knob, glancing over her shoulder at Roxy, eyes ablaze, defiant. “This used to be my room.”

Before Roxy can even begin to process that, Gazelle opens the door.

What Roxy expects to be revealed behind it, she doesn’t know. Maybe something more than the plain white walls and four disused single beds within. More than the detailed artisan-crafted rugs that line the tile floor. More than the only item in the room that isn’t for practical function, a slim blue glass vase on the windowsill holding two dried flower husks. There is little else to distinguish the musty room that, aside from needing a little airing out, was almost intentionally made to appear bland, impersonal. Empty of its past as much as it was robbed of its future.

Gazelle doesn’t pause to reminisce, crossing the room to the furthest bed by the window and pulling the entire thing away from the wall. The metal legs of the frame scrape against the floor and jostle the small bureau beside it until she clears enough space to reveal a gap in the floor, large enough for only a child’s hand to fit through.

Gazelle’s remaining hand isn’t that small anymore, so she balls it into a fist, draws her arm back, and sends it through the chipped tiles in one sharp blow, splintering them apart.

Seconds slip by as she blindly feels around whatever hidden space exists beneath, her face growing increasingly frustrated as what she expected to find is clearly absent. Finally, she’s forced to give up, sitting back on her heels, cradling her bloodied hand in her lap. For the first time since this whole thing began, she looks uncertain, even lost. “It’s not here.”

“What do you mean?” Roxy steps into the room from where she remained hovering in the doorway, anger overcoming her hesitance. “You were so certain. You said you _knew_.”

“I thought I did!” Gazelle says helplessly. “He told me! He told me he kept his work in a place I would know that no one else would. It had to be important to me. This is the only place!”

“An orphanage? Your orphanage? What’s so bloody important about it?” Roxy demands.

Gazelle’s gaze slides away from Roxy, growing unfocused with memory. She’s so quiet, Roxy almost misses her answer. “This is the place where he first saw me. Where he chose me.”

“Yet Valentine cut off the shelter’s funding and allowed for all its children be... _slaughtered_ by his signal.” Roxy sneers. “Obviously it didn’t mean as much to him as it did to you.”

“We had to speed up the production schedule. It was very costly,” Gazelle bows her head, her hair falling around her face. “He must have closed down the charities to reroute the funds towards production. He was spooked by your agency’s appearance.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered in the long run had your plan worked. Clearly it didn’t matter here either way,” Roxy says, not even able to find satisfaction in the way Gazelle’s shoulders hunch with every word spat out until she’s practically curled up on the floor. “Or did that thought never occur to you?”

“I...I knew it was going to happen.” Gazelle stumbles and trips over her words, shaking her head like the gesture would get them out easier. “But I did not think...I did not realise….”

“How could you possibly not know what was going to happen?” Roxy asks, bewildered. No, _demands_. “Did you think that magical ten percent of the remaining population would somehow include them, despite having no protection, no time to prepare, no forewarning? How many children do you think Madam Oulmou has nightmares about killing? Did you not _think_ of the damage you could have and in fact _had_ done? That maybe it’s worse for the ones who didn’t die?”

“I hated this place!” Gazelle shouts at her, teeth bared, echoing off the bare walls and ringing through the nearly empty room.

Roxy freezes in place.

Her silence only seems to enrage Gazelle further. “This whole backwards, piece of shit country! No one cares for you if you are not blood! If you do not have family here, then you have _nothing_.”

“So you’d rather have just seen it all burn?” And something in Roxy quakes at the thought of how much fury it must take to fuel that level of hatred. It feels like heartburn, smouldering in her chest, simmering vitriol in her throat, threatening to disintegrate everything in her wake with a touch.

“Why not?” Gazelle slowly pushes herself upright, smoothly unfurling her spine and legs like a determined vine climbing through a crack in the wall towards the sun. Once more, she becomes ice to Roxy’s quiet incineration. “They took everything from me first.”

 

_____

 

Maybe two years ago, Roxy would have been more concerned by her tendency to turn to alcohol to shake off the stress of a long, difficult day―pints with Eggsy when they’re both in town, glasses of wine to relax with on a solo night, fingers of commiserating scotch with Merlin in the iron heart of headquarters―but given the organisation she works for and its aesthetic reverence for libations, who could truly blame her? Rarely did Kingsman agents live long enough to suffer the consequential cirrhosis. 

There’s precious little alcohol to be found in the entire country, but Gazelle shows her a discrete shop that sells Algerian wine where she picks up a Syrah and Cab Sav: smooth, rich, and apparently very boozy, which Roxy only belatedly realises after she refills her glass for the third time.

With a buoyant haze settling over her brain like a fine mist, she wanders through the open doors of their small hotel room onto the balcony, taking pleasure in the cool, briny air on her flushed cheeks and marvelling at the imperious spread of the city lights curving gently around the dark blanket sea.

It’s maybe not the most brilliant idea to let down her guard this much in the company of a notably lethal enemy, but Gazelle, perched precariously atop the balustrade with a half-empty glass of wine pinched between her knees and a rolled cigarette pinched between her fingers, remains unresponsive to Roxy’s presence.

It gives Roxy a shameless opportunity to study her opponent, she tells herself. The cigarette creates a thin wisp of smoke from between Gazelle’s scabbed over fingers and smells earthy and herbal. The dim luminescence of the city paints her face in gossamer and shadow. Her eyes remain at half-mast, thoughts turned introspective, long eyelashes nearly sweeping her cheeks.

She’s so still, Roxy is tempted to reach out and see if she was turned to stone. Her hand twitches forward before she can think twice about it, and the flicker of aborted movement swiftly pins Gazelle’s gaze to her, two coal black eyes that burn with the intensity of a newborn star.

“I wouldn’t have thought you smoked,” Roxy says weakly after scrambling for something to fill the awkward silence.

Gazelle looks down at her cigarette almost in surprise like she forgot she still held it. “Not often, but I like my vices in twos. Less lonely that way.”

As if to punctuate her point, Gazelle brings it up to her lips and hollows her cheeks, the tip flaring up in a vivid point of orange. Her chest expands as she leans her head back against the wall, savouring the smoke for several long moments before finally letting it stream past her lips. “Taste of home.”

She sighs, looking indecently sated before nodding to the glass Roxy cradles against her chest. “And you? Just the one?”

“I never really had the time to acquire very many. I was never allowed, you see.” Roxy swirls the dark red liquid round and round in her glass—a little too roughly at one point, enough to spill some over the rim and splash her knuckles, which she brings to her lips to suck clean.

Gazelle smirks. “That’s funny, I usually find those kinds of environments breed the worst ones of all.”

“Well, here I am.” Roxy grimly smiles back, knowing it isn’t a very pretty sight with wine-stained teeth and desolation. “Drinking with my enemy, defying my organisation, gambling with my fate.” And _losing_. “I guess you can say I like my wine with a dash of treason.”

“If this is where you expect me to apologise, then you’ll be sorely disappointed.”

“I know,” Roxy says, even as she is surprised to find she isn’t angry at Gazelle this time. “I made my own bed.” The sinking feeling in her stomach returns, accompanied by an expanding pressure against the inside of her chest at the enormity of what she has done. The pleasant buzz cottoning her head begins to turn into the dull beats of a migraine.

Gazelle’s pre-emptive defence relents. “For what it’s worth, I am...grateful you tried.”

“I don’t know what to do now,” Roxy admits. “Return to Kingsman, beg for leniency....” She can hardly bear the thought of Merlin’s expression, of Eggsy not being able to even look at her anymore. 

“You’re already giving up?”

It sounds like an accusation. Roxy frowns. “I’ve already gone too far. Right now, I can only hope I can still come back from this.”

“And I suppose I am to be taken back with you as some sort of _conciliatory prize_.” Gazelle says with a look of clear contempt.

“It’s what I should have done in the first place,” Roxy points out.

“Your masters will torture me for information, thinking I have something to tell them that I haven’t already tried to find myself. That I’m just being stubborn. Do you think I wanted to come back here?”

“I don’t know, Gazelle. I don’t know you. I certainly don’t trust you.” Roxy grits her teeth, setting her glass down lest she be tempted to throw it against the wall. “I only know you would obviously prefer to not be incarcerated, and that directly conflicts with my own mission.”

“Well, you’re not wrong there,” Gazelle concedes, raising a brow. “Doesn’t change the fact the research is still out there, waiting to fall into the wrong hands.”

“If you couldn’t find it, then why would Valentine’s business partner be able to?”

“You said it yourself. Maybe Valentine trusted him more than I assumed. And me…” Gazelle pauses, swallowing, before frowning and stabbing the last of her cigarette on the stone ledge more forcefully than the act requires. “...less than I thought.”

The wavering uncertainty in her tone causes Roxy to look up. It’s a disconcerting sight: how Gazelle curls up on herself, shoulders hunched, knees pulled closer to her chest.

“Then tell me who he is, at least,” Roxy finds herself imploring. “Tell me now or that’s what they’ll force out of you.”

Gazelle just shakes her head, and Roxy wants to smash her fist into the stone to shake off the well of frustration that rises within her.

“Did you know,” Gazelle abruptly says, “my grandmother was forced to spy for the FLN in the war for this country’s independence? Many women wanted to help the cause, but some, especially the poor ones, were forced into it. What do they call it again? Impressment?”

“Yes,” Roxy confirms, already pulled into this glimmer of personal insight despite of herself.

“She warmed the bed of French soldiers and passed back valuable intel, but then she got pregnant with my mother. After the French left, everyone looked at her like she was a Frenchman’s whore. This woman who gave up her body and virtue for her people, and she was scorned. She was too ashamed to go back to her family, so she continued to do the only thing she knew how to support her child. She died young that way, but she made sure her family claimed and raised her baby. She was a warrior. My mother said I look just like her.” Gazelle drains the rest of her glass in one go, setting the glass down hard and meeting Roxy’s eyes. “Now you.”

“I don’t….” Roxy opens her mouth and stutters before closing it again. Caught wrong-footed, her cheeks feel hot with more than just alcohol. Her brain becomes stupid and slow, feeling out words like patting a hand around in the dark. “I don’t know what you want me to say. My family’s...very well off. And old. Nothing too dramatic in our history that you couldn’t find in hundreds of history books already. I’m my parents’ only child and not a boy, much to their disappointment. But they’re still alive. We’re not...we’re not very close.”

“Why not?”

“That’s another question,” Roxy says, feeling a ridiculous thrill at the parry, more so when Gazelle looks taken aback for a moment before acknowledging the catch. “I want to know how and when you first met Valentine. You said it was at the shelter.” Clearly, Gazelle’s mother didn’t get her happily ever after.

“I had parents too,” Gazelle says softly. “Married, in love. You think what Valentine did threw the world into chaos. It’s a nice view from your lofty seat in England, but I tell you, in this country, it’s only ever been chaos and war. War for independence, and then the war after the war, fighting amongst ourselves like we don’t know anything else. They came for my family. All of them. My mother’s family. My father’s. They called them the Massacres. Whole tribes slaughtered in one night. I was seven. I lost my feet when a man hacked them off with a machete after killing my mother and father in front of me. He was never charged for his crimes. He got _amnesty_.”

Gazelle stretches out her legs, one at a time, crossing them at the ankles. The prosthetic feet themselves cannot move, cannot flex like this. Roxy stares at them in mounting horror, rendered speechless by the flatly delivered admission.

“I was lucky. With no family left to claim me, I would have been left for the streets, but Valentine heard about the war and started the shelter. For two years I lived there, stuck in that godforsaken bed because I refused to crawl like a dog.”

The loathing is so thick in Gazelle’s voice that Roxy wonders how that place remained standing after they left empty handed.

“And then one day, Valentine visits. And all the children run down to the front to greet him and perform for him like circus animals. I am stuck in the bed upstairs, and...and then he comes _to me_. And he sees me. He tells me that when he is finished, I will run like a gazelle.” Gazelle’s gaze bores into Roxy, willing her to understand. “He _sees me_.”

And Roxy, god help her, she does.

A young and angry and traumatised girl with nothing left in the world and no hope for anything better suddenly catches the attention of a billionaire American genius. He’s her way out; her hope for a better life. Of course she was going to take it. Of course she was going to dedicate the rest of her life to her saviour. She owed him _everything_.

Roxy draws in a shaky breath, releasing it until she feels light headed and the panorama of the city blurs before her in a bokeh of light. “I was engaged once, to a boy whose family was very close with mine. He had quietly proposed in the summer before my second year at uni and I was supposed to marry this...this very nice boy the next summer after graduation. I was supposed to be a good wife.” His name was Thomas. Tommy. He liked Yeats and Blake but had such a sunny disposition and good sense of humour, one would never know it. “But when the time came round, I just...I felt like I was being suffocated. Like something was squeezing my chest in a vice and I couldn’t. I didn’t. I don’t think my parents have ever forgiven me for that. Or for any of it, really. But to have done otherwise, it would have been...it would have…..”

From the corner of her eye, Gazelle shifts, leaning forward, intent, like what Roxy has to say is the most fascinating thing in the world and not another cliche story of a rebellious daughter. “It would have been like a living death.”

Roxy blinks to clear her vision and meets Gazelle’s eyes, sharp with knowing. “Yes.” And close, unexpectedly so close. Gazelle moved until she was right next to Roxy without her having sensed it, smelling sweet and smoky. It should alarm her, but it doesn’t. She’s rooted to the spot.

“Roxy.”

It’s the first time she has ever said Roxy’s name, spoken from lips stained wine red, tongue rolling on the first syllable, the second pinched out hard and deep. Roxy’s whole being rises and falls on them, blood rushing tempestuously in her ears. “Yes?”

“I know where to look next.”


	4. Chapter 4

They take a taxi through the winding, crowded roads of the white-washed Kasbah where the sun slats over the ornate edges of old buildings, minarets, and mosques. They pass a souk with several stalls of vibrant fabrics, knock-off Chinese electronics, hand-painted clay tagines and other plateware, to say nothing of the bounty of food being made through thick clouds of steam from deep-barrelled metal tubs and sizzling outdoor grills. The air is rich with spices emanating from the open doors of little restaurants: nutmeg, cumin, coriander, and saffron. Roxy has soldiered through enough of her hangover to reach the _ravenous_ stage and restrains herself from sticking her head out the window to scent the air like a dog.

Finally, Gazelle has their driver stop in front of a broad three-storey stucco house that, like much of the overcrowded and dilapidated neighbourhood, has seen better days. It’s easy to get a sense of its former grandeur, though: the crumbling embellishments on the windows and over the door are a testament to that, but time and the sea air have long since stripped the paint and infiltrated the walls with mould and damp. The house now has a grimy, abandoned feel to it. A corner of the foundation is already sinking back into the earth.

“Is it even safe to go in?” Roxy asks, eyeing the house dubiously.

“Valentine renovated this place just enough to assure it was structurally sound, but it worked towards his purposes to maintain its natural camouflage,” Gazelle explains before leaning down to activate a hidden panel among the tangled flora crawling up the doorframe and unlocking the door with a biometric scan of her palm.

Inside is a layout similar to what Roxy saw of other houses in the city: open, high-ceiling rooms laid out around a central courtyard to take advantage of as much light as possible, only here the windows are boarded up and the air is stale and cold, hardly looking much better than its exterior. Water drips down the walls, stained to a rust colour. The tile on the floor is scuffed and chipped when it isn’t entirely missing. The entire front atrium is bare of any furniture or decoration. The home, while perhaps not being in danger of falling down upon their heads, still isn’t habitable by any stretch.

“Why?” Roxy finally asks.

“It’s upstairs,” Gazelle says instead, beckoning Roxy to follow with a foreboding curl of her finger.

They ascend the narrow steps that are nevertheless solid and even well-constructed. One of the uncompromised safety renovations, Roxy thinks. The first-storey landing remains open over the courtyard and ringed with various rooms. Most of the doors are missing. 

“I had it wrong before.” Gazelle looks at her, practically shooting off sparks of barely bridled energy. “I wasn’t thinking from the right point of view. I thought the shelter was the most important moment of my life, but you made me remember.”

“Remember?”

“The moment _he_ thought was most important.”

They walk past several bare rooms until they reach the last in the corner, a mirror of Gazelle’s room at the shelter. This one has a door with a worn wooden embellishment carved into it. Roxy thinks it was once a vivid indigo, but most of the paint is now worn away. Gazelle doesn’t hesitate to throw it open, and at first Roxy isn’t sure what’s so different about this particular room, just as empty and decaying as the others.

But then, she sees.

It’s faint, and if one didn’t know what old, dried blood looked like, one might have thought the copious stains splashed across the floor were caked mud, maybe old paint. It’s all over the floor and splattered across the walls, just about enough blood to fill a human body.

“What is this?” Roxy asks. The cold, clammy air isn’t doing much to appease the sickening sense of dread curdling in her stomach. The room feels desolate with ghosts.

“This is all that’s left of the man who killed my mother and father, and maimed me,” Gazelle says, coming to a stop in the centre of the room where the stains are the most concentrated. “My first. You always remember it. Valentine had arranged it for me and then kept it all like this. Best gift I ever received.”

“The most important moment of your life,” Roxy echoes uncertainly.

“The moment when I truly saw _myself_. I can’t believe I ever doubted him.”

Killer. Warrior. Survivor. Roxy looks at and sees her now, standing tall and self-possessed amidst the rusting shadows of the past now preserved like a museum, glaring at Roxy as a rebuke for having ever made her feel any uncertainty in the first place.

And then Gazelle raises one leg and stomps down hard on the floor, and to Roxy’s astonishment, the frail tile easily gives way, falling into a dark hole. It’s not so deep, though. She can hear where the pieces ping against something metal.

After clearing away enough tile, Gazelle stands back and Roxy steps closer to see a metal safe lodged into the floor, sealed and secured with another biometric scanner.

“This is why we never had to worry about anyone else getting to it,” Gazelle says softly, her hand tenderly stroking the cool metal of the safe. “Any sign of tampering, and the safe will destroy its own contents.”

It yields to her palmprint as easily as the front door had, and Roxy’s anticipation mounts as Gazelle pulls open the safe’s door. She sees the stacks of money in various currencies first, then the telltale matte colours of numerous passports, hand guns, ammo, knives—everything to make a quick getaway—and then...a torn up sheaf of paper.

Literally torn in half lengthwise. Roxy crouches down to peer closer, picking up the thick stack and trying to read the faded print on what’s left in an effort to make sense of it: bisected diagrams and cut-off equations strewn across nearly every page. “Where’s the rest of it?” The safe is fairly shallow. There’s nothing else.

“Likely in the hands of Valentine’s partner by now.”

Roxy stares at half the research in her hands, belatedly realising Gazelle isn’t particularly surprised or upset by the revelation.

“But...you said….” Roxy begins, then breaks off, unable to comprehend what the hell this even is. “You said he wouldn’t get it. You said….”

“What I meant was that he couldn’t get all of it.”

"Why?"

Gazelle remains unrepentant. "Think of what happened after men like Mao or Julius Caesar died. Nobody inherits the golden gun without having to earn it. It was another layer of security in case of a power vacuum."

“You lied to me,” Roxy says flatly. She doesn’t know why she feels so... _hurt_.

“I neglected to tell you everything,” Gazelle corrects.

“You _lied_.”

“We’re on different sides. We don’t trust each other. What did you expect?” 

Roxy stands up, the shorn paper clenched in her hands. “Give me one good reason why I don’t just drag you back to Kingsman myself and make sure they throw you into the deepest hole they can find?”

“Because you will need me to get back the other half,” Gazelle says calmly.

“Or,” Roxy holds up the paper and shakes it angrily, “I could just throw this half in the fire and then no one gets to recreate the mass-murdering signal.”

“Sure, you would be throwing a spanner in the works.” Gazelle shrugs. “Maybe you will have delayed it by a few years, but Valentine’s partner has half the work done already. He’s determined enough to eventually figure out what’s missing.”

She’s right, and Roxy hates her for it. Hates how she had control of the whole situation all along and still bloody well does. Hates feeling like a pawn.

“And how do you propose we get the rest of it?” she asks after swallowing down the last of her anger. It wouldn’t do. Calm, cool head, that’s how to go about this. Think it through.

“First thing’s first: we get the hell out of this country,” Gazelle says as she begins to pack up the rest of the safe’s contents.

Roxy isn’t spiteful enough not to bend down and help her, making sure to confiscate all the weapons first despite the exasperated look it garners her.

But when they stand, readying to leave that shambolic house and, as Gazelle would say, the entire God forsaken country, Roxy turns back to her and steps in close enough to count the flecks of black intermingled with brown in her eyes, forcing all of Gazelle’s attention to focus on her.

“If you ever lie to me again, I will personally kill you, and this time, I’ll make sure it sticks.”

Before Gazelle can reply, Roxy turns and walks away.

 

_____

 

With a decent amount of money recovered from the safe and solid new IDs, getting out of the country is a much quicker and easier affair than coming in was, but ever since regularly experiencing the luxury and convenience of Kingsman’s private jets, commercial airlines don’t hold much appeal. Especially in economy seating. For over 15 hours.

“I feel like I’ve just aged ten years,” Roxy says blearily as they stumble through the overly-lit terminal.

Even Gazelle, who often seems to move through life appearing removed and unbesmirched by the pitiful world around her, looks a bit wilted. Airport security was an exercise in self restraint as they examined her prosthetics with suspicion. It could always be worse, though. At least they weren’t in the States.

It’s still another three hour’s drive out of Shanghai to Ningbo. Their new base of operations turns out to be a just barely constructed flat on the 30th floor of a towering apartment complex that didn’t exist two months ago. The view from the windows is nothing short of astounding: cranes, scaffolding, and half-finished construction projects up and down both sides of the river, an entire logistics hub being built from the ground up in less than a year.

“The power of the Party,” Gazelle remarks, unimpressed. But then, she’s lived in high-tech mastermind lairs literally carved into mountains. Her standards are quite a bit higher.

Roxy feels horribly jetlagged, deliriously exhausted beyond all reasoning, and it’s probably not a good sign that she’s starting to feel like an alien inside her own body. The air is drenched with humidity and the dark skies overhead promise a looming downpour. There’s no AC unit set up in the flat yet, and the moist heat is sticky against Roxy’s skin, clumping her hair to the back of her neck. Opening the windows lets in more construction noise, mosquitoes, and the rank scent of pollution than fresh air, but it’s better than nothing.

Their money also went towards the purchase of equipment: laptops, burner phones, and questionably legal computer hardware that Gazelle swears will be useful for them in setting up the meet.

“He’s a wealthy, highly intelligent man of power and means in the tech space. You don’t just call him up and tell him you’ve got something he wants.” Gazelle plugs cables into ports and unscrews the panels off devices Roxy can’t name to expose all the wires and motherboards within, all one-handed and frighteningly adept. Roxy is relegated to assisting only as needed, trying not to feel obsolete. “That’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

“Then what do we do?”

“Call him up.” Before Roxy can open her mouth with a retort, Gazelle holds up screwdriver. “But make sure he can’t trace our location.”

“By going through multiple proxy servers, yes, I’ve seen enough films to understand the gist of it.” Roxy gives her an exasperated look and blows the hair from her face. It got terribly frizzy. “You could have just said.”

Gazelle’s smile is just the barest glimmer, difficult to discern whether it ever really existed at all, but somehow Roxy can tell. Somewhere down the line, she has become well-versed in reading the fleeting glimpses of Gazelle’s language. Her hair, of course, is as smooth as a sheet of black silk.

“Maybe I just want to impress you.”

At first Roxy thinks she misheard the coy tone, then misconstrued, and is left floundering all the same. Her ears burn, and then it doesn’t matter anyway when Gazelle lays one of the mobiles on the table, sets it to speakerphone before dialing a number.

A series of chirps rings out three times before someone, at last, picks up.

“Who is this and how did you get this number?” a male voice asks, calm and erudite, but with a steely undertone that promises swift and lethal violence.

“Is that any way to greet an old friend, Stephen?” Gazelle asks with the perfect approximation of teasing animosity.

The line goes quiet for several telling moments. Roxy can almost hear him struggling through a world that has been promptly upended in just a few goading words. She can certainly commiserate.

 _Stephen_. Likely only a Western business name. Still, it’s more information than she had before.

“Gazelle.” Stephen is not quite able to entirely rid his tone of its shock. “I thought you hadn’t made it out of the bunker.”

“Apparently I’m harder to kill than I look.” Gazelle’s smile as sweet as the edge of a knife. Roxy thinks Stephen can hear it too.

“So it would seem.” And just like that, he recovers enough of his wits to bear his teeth right back. “There was a time when you would have died for your master.”

Gazelle’s smile slips off her face as the insinuation strikes true. No more playfulness now. “We’re both trying to make the best of this situation, aren’t we? So let’s get to the point. As soon as you woke up from V-Day still alive, you went looking for it, didn’t you?” There’s a quick intake of breath on the other end, but otherwise, Stephen remains silent. Gazelle smirks. “How would you look at the situation now? Glass half empty or half full?”

“You seem to have adopted Valentine’s eccentric sense of humour. It doesn’t really suit you,” Stephen hisses, cloak of niceties dropped to reveal a kind of refined viciousness in its place.

“Well, you were always very fond of reminding us you own fifty percent of the company. Valentine thought it only fair you get half the research.”

“What do you want, Gazelle? Make it fast before I alert the authorities that you’re still alive. There won’t be a country on earth that won’t be looking for you.”

“I have the other half.”

The silence, this time, is more calculating, wary. “And what do you want for it?”

“To stay part of the game,” Gazelle says too smoothly for it to not be entirely untrue. “I give you the missing half, we work on recreating Valentine’s tech. And split the sales, of course. Girl’s gotta eat.”

“Unlike you, I’m not interested in destroying the global population. It’s not very good for business when you kill all your customers.” _Myself included_ does not need to be said.

“That was Valentine’s dream, but he’s gone now, isn’t he?” If Roxy closed her eyes, only listened to Gazelle speaking, she would swear they were just words meant to entice, another spike of the ball to the other side of the court. But Roxy’s eyes are open, and they’ve been intent on Gazelle the whole time. Gazelle doesn’t look at her, too focused on trying to bore a hole into the opposite wall with her eyes. “Now we just concentrate on making countries pay to play.”

“Forgive me for the lack of trust,” Stephen says, not more than a little sarcastic, “but how do I know you aren’t trying to deceive me?”

Gazelle idly drags a finger across the mobile’s screen, then impatiently taps at the glass. “I’ve just sent you some sample scans. You’re free to verify them for authenticity. If you find them to your liking, we can set up a meet. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. All or nothing.”

Roxy counts the seconds, imagining Stephen zooming in on the images, squinting, knowing what he’ll find will seem real, but needing to make a show of it anyway for appearance’s sake. “Fine. If you are, in fact, telling the truth, I’ll text you with next steps. I don’t think I have to warn you about trying to get one by me.”

“I look forward to hearing from you,” Gazelle says, cloyingly saccharine, before ending the call.

“It can’t be that easy,” Roxy immediately says.

“No,” Gazelle agrees. “He’ll think I’m going to try something, which I am. I obviously think the same, and he will.”

“Then why would we ever risk bringing the whole thing to him for the taking? Why would he?”

“Because we would both demand nothing less than laying all our cards on the table and we both know this will be our only chance to get what we want.”

“Then we’ll...what? Knowingly walk into a trap risking everything we have?”

Gazelle considers it. “Pretty much.”

She says this like it’s perfectly normal, not completely, irrationally _insane_. Like Stephen isn’t a dangerous man with resources nearly equivalent to what Valentine had and far less of his whimsy—because Roxy got that much from hearing his voice. He isn’t a man you fucked with unless you were absolutely certain he couldn’t get back up again.

The ever-cautious, risk-calculating part of Roxy is in near hysterics over the odds that any such meeting will turn out well, and to see Gazelle remain calm in the face of those prospects, as if she merely heard it would rain on a day she’d planned for an outing, is infuriating and exasperating in equal measure. Roxy presses her palms to her cheeks and fingertips to her temples as if she could keep the madness contained therein. “Is this...is this normal for you?”

“Honestly? Ever since that room where it all began? Yeah.”

It has a sobering effect on Roxy’s mounting sleep-deprived fit, dropping her back into the cold reality of what Gazelle’s life must have been like to forge the woman before her today. “Is that what Valentine did? Raise you to be some sort of...what? A weapon?”

“No,” Gazelle says. “He supported me while I studied dance.”

The burgeoning skies finally reach their tipping point, breaking open in a drenching storm that smears the edges of reality into an impressionistic landscape. The construction noises immediately cease, replaced by the dull roar of rain beating against the newly laid out pavement and buildings. It beats down on the roof of the building, compounding the din, like the whole world is shattering apart.

“Dance?” Roxy repeats. She can’t decide whether to be impressed or sceptical.

“L'Opéra national de Paris.”

Roxy’s gaze reflexively darts to Gazelle’s feet before she can restrain herself. Gazelle scowls. “I could have been been Prima.” There’s a brief pause; old resentments reignite in her eyes. “If no one had cared about a ballerina with metal feet and brown skin.”

“So instead you decided to become Valentine’s pet assassin?” In a strange way, it makes sense. She saw how Gazelle fought, moving as fluidly as the most accomplished ballerina and as swiftly as an apex predator. 

“When you live with a genius who actually makes the world a better place, suddenly dance seems...small.”

 _You’re a selfish, small girl, Roxy_ , her father snarled at her, just after she called the engagement off. _You bring shame upon this family_!

“Do you still remember it? How to dance?”

Gazelle gives her another one of those looks that makes Roxy think she should have tried harder, a mixture of exasperation and disappointment. Roxy is about to change the subject back to their mission when Gazelle slides out of the chair and walks toward the open expanse of space before the balcony that isn’t covered in computer hardware and cables.

“This will hardly be my best work,” Gazelle warns before her legs seal together in an uninterrupted line, her whole body drawing staunch and tall as an old tree, arms arched above her head in first position.

And then she begins to move, and any words Roxy wants to say dry up.

Sheets of rain fiercely blow in through the open doors, outlining Gazelle’s silhouette in a spray of rebounding water, soaking into her clothes, matting her hair across her face in dark wisps, cascading off the corded muscles beneath her skin. Her gaze grows introspective, lost in whatever reverie people fall into when thought no sooner becomes action.

Roxy appreciates Gazelle’s fighting style, especially when not on its receiving end, but here, stripped of steel and mortality, significantly slowed down into seamless adagio and pulsating allegro, she finds herself utterly entranced by the physicality of her body. It’s a perfect encapsulation of strength and control, every move precise and effortless, from arabesque down to the articulation of her fingers. When Gazelle finishes with a sweep of her arm back into the air, she turns her face up to the sky like a baptism.

It’s not entirely perfect—Gazelle’s prosthetics aren’t very agile, she can’t do en pointe, and months of interrogation have robbed her of utmost finesse—but there’s something stunning about the depth of her movements, missing arm or no.

It’s lyricism writ large through motion, and Roxy, unexpectedly, finds herself transported.

And then Gazelle retracts herself behind the smooth wall of her impenetrable blankness, draws her heels back together and pushes the wet hair from her face before dropping her arm to her side—and with it, the illusion.

“It hardly feels small when you put it like that,” Roxy says quietly.

Gazelle scrutinises her as if she is looking for any signs of deceit, but Roxy feels a bit too raw to blurt out anything other than the truth.

It must be enough. The corners of Gazelle’s mouth curve up faintly, her expression softened into one of bemused wonder.

 

_____

 

There’s about thirty seconds immediately after Roxy wakes up where everything seems normal. And then she tries to sit up.

Immediately, her vision begins to swim and her queasy stomach gives a sickening roll. Something sour and acidic pools at the back of her throat and her skull feels like someone had a whack at it with a bludgeon.

Last memory: out with the girls to celebrate the end of first-term exams. She’s still wearing her evening dress, which now feels as grotty as a clinging layer of dead skin. If this is the result, then it must have been a good night indeed.

There’s nothing for it; she immediately sinks back down onto the mattress with a pathetic groan and buries herself back in her blankets.

Except, these aren’t her blankets, she only belatedly realises. In fact, this isn’t even _her room_.

She shoots upright, sheer adrenaline cutting through her hangover, to take better stock of her surroundings. Dark grey walls, white trim, tasteful furnishings in dark wood, modern lines, double bed with an off-white duvet, dresser, wardrobe, bedside table, a tasteful black and white photograph of the London skyline hung on the wall, and...a white fur rug?

It smells like something vaguely fresh and woodsy, not overpowering, but the aroma is definitely coming from the fragrance diffuser sitting on top of the dresser.

Roxy frowns. This is hardly the bedroom of a uni boy, not even one whose flat had been paid for by his father.

A knock on the door pulls Roxy from her growing confusion. “Yes?”

“May I come in?” says a familiar voice that Roxy can’t quite place….

“Alright.”

...until the door opens and Ali leans halfway into the room. Roxy hasn’t seen him since...well, it’s been over ten years now, hasn’t it? Jesus.

She’s staring. She knows she is, but she can’t quite work out what to say.

“Ah, right. Hullo, Roxy.” Ali shuffles his feet in embarrassment, expression abashed. It’s utterly bewildering. “You may not remember me….” 

“Of course I do,” Roxy finally whispers.

Ali is older, of course. In his thirties now, surely. His face is thinned out with more angles, harder lines. His shoulders are _broad_. His button-down is slim cut, conforming to a frame that is slender but far more muscular than the skinny beanpole she recalled as a child.

He wears those thick-rimmed glasses she remembers from before that make him look so very serious. He _is_ serious now. There’s a sober maturity that sits on his shoulders and permeates his entire being.

“I didn’t think I would ever see you again,” Roxy admits. “I wouldn’t have blamed you. My parents were wretched to you. I still can’t forgive myself for causing you to be—”

“It’s water under the bridge,” Ali says, neatly halting her self-recrimination in its tracks. “I’ve never blamed you for any of it. You were just a child, Roxy. How could it have been your fault?”

The thing is, he sounds sincere, gaze warm and open, leaving Roxy with little other choice than to believe him. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t lessen the guilt any, which makes for an awful sensation when still in the throes of her hangover. She twists the edges of the duvet between her fingers and scrapes her fuzzy teeth against her lower lip, praying she won’t sick up all over herself. “What am I doing here?”

“ _That_ is a bit of a tale, but first I think you’ll appreciate these more,” Ali says, finally pushing the door open wider to slip further into the room and revealing what’s in his hands: a glass of water and ibuprofen.

“You’re a godsend,” Roxy says, tossing the tablets into her mouth before guzzling down the tepid water.

“Ah, slow sips now—” Ali warns as Roxy almost chokes and spits it out. He winces.

She manages to swallow, barely, whilst staring at the glass of water in her hands as if it has caused her personal offence. “ _Ugh_ , what is this?”

“Rehydration solution. Water, plus a six-to-one ratio of sugar and salt,” Ali says, then off Roxy’s look, adds, “It will hydrate your body more quickly, but take your time in drinking it.”

There’s something so profoundly competent about the entire explanation that Roxy finds herself once more rendered speechless of anything even remotely intelligent to say, so she settles for a quiet _thank you_ and takes a much more cautious sip next time.

“Darling, breakfast is just about ready!” a dulcet and distinctly male voice rings out from downstairs. “You know I’m more than capable of consuming it all if you don’t get down here in the next minute and then we shall have to find a way to work off all those calories. Actually, now that I’ve said it, it doesn’t sound like a half-bad plan. Have you woken her yet? If not, then don’t! I can be quick!”

Roxy arches a brow at Ali and is bemused to find a faint blush staining his cheeks.

“And that would be James,” Ali says with a slight roll of his eyes before leaning his head back out into the hall to call out, “Well, if she wasn’t before, she is now thanks to all your shouting, _Dearest_!”

“Is he your…?”

A look that can only be described as highly discomfited flashes across his face. “Yes. Well, of a sort...but yes. I think.”

“You’re not sure?”

“Like many things in life, it’s complicated.” And he doesn’t appear inclined to explain anything in further detail.

Roxy finishes her solution and Ali gives her an old tatty Cambridge hoodie and the smallest set of flannel pyjama bottoms he owns to change into before they shuffle downstairs and join James for breakfast.

The house isn’t all that different from what she can recall. Perhaps there are a few more personal touches of decoration, more books on the shelves, more art on the walls. More lived in, more comfortable, like Ali settled into his own skin. She immediately sees the baby grand in its expected corner and is relieved to know it’s still there.

The table is laden with a feast of savoury and sweet breakfast items, from crisp bacon to a misshapen stack of American-style pancakes. Occupying one of the chairs is a tall man of similar age to Ali and in possession of the same confident bearing that Roxy can’t entirely describe so much as inherently sense. As soon as he sees her, he pushes back his chair and stands, dipping his head to her in greeting, a wide smile stretched across his lips and merriment glinting in his eyes. “Ah, the younger Morton arrives.”

Between him and Ali, they’re both well styled, falling towards the higher end of casual, with neatly made hair and well-moisturised faces. Here Roxy is with a bird’s nest atop her head, bloodshot eyes, ill pallor, and clothes that probably make her look like a scrubby child playing in an adult’s clothes.

“James, this is Roxanne, my first cousin once removed,” Ali introduces. Roxy has to push back one of the hoodie’s sleeves when James extends a hand. 

“It’s good to finally meet you,” James says as he eagerly shakes her hand in the manner of an enthusiastic puppy. “Ali’s spoken of you at great length. All good things, rest assured.”

“Call me Roxy, please,” she says, darting a quick glance at Ali, who is a master at maintaining a poker face. “It’s, uh, nice to meet you. I’m sorry I look like I just rolled out of bed. It’s because I did.”

“You’ve had quite a night, Roxy. It’s only to be expected.” She doesn’t miss the exasperated look Ali shoots in James’s direction.

It’s more than a little alarming. “Why? What happened?” Once again, she struggles to recall last night’s events, but hits a disturbing wall. “I can’t remember anything. I don’t even know how I ended up here.”

“Why don’t you sit down first and I’ll load up your plate,” Ali suggests.

Though she’s starting to get annoyed by all this tentativeness, she takes her seat and watches as her cousin piles a plate with enough food to feed her for a week, clearly not attuned to the diet by which the average uni girl abides, while James makes her a cup of tea with one sugar and a splash of milk per her specifications.

“Go on, eat up,” James encourages once the plate is set before her. “I don’t make it a habit to whip up this good a breakfast very often. I’m told I’ve a real talent for it.”

And so Roxy does, halfheartedly at first until she realises she’s starving, and then she all but eschews conversation in order to maintain the thinnest veneer of civility while she inhales the contents on her plate, letting the grease sop up the last vestiges of illness lingering in her stomach. James didn’t exaggerate: it’s all to the good, the very good, with fluffy eggs and thick, bready pancakes and wonderfully salty bacon that crackles between her teeth. She eats more than she really ought, enough to make her think she’ll have to increase the length of her morning runs for the next two weeks, before sitting back in her chair, bloated and exhausted.

They sit across from her like two concerned parents, which strikes Roxy as immensely funny, considering her own mother and father. “We believe the reason why last night is so difficult to remember is because your drink was spiked,” Ali begins.

Which... _oh_. Suddenly, she wishes she didn’t eat so much because now it churns unpleasantly in her stomach. It explains a lot: the obscure vague impressions of time rather than concrete memories, the outsized hangover she feels when she swore she didn’t have that much, knowing she wanted to avoid feeling exactly as she did right now.

She should probably feel more worry, but something about the placid faces of the men sitting across from her staves off the panic attack she knows ought to be descending right about now. “Did something happen?”

“We took care of it before it could become a problem,” James says. And that’s it, like that’s all the explanation she needs to be satisfied. “Since your mates weren’t in any state to take you back home and care for you, Ali thought it best to bring you here to sleep it off.”

Roxy lowers her gaze to his hands, only now noticing the dark abrasions on his knuckles. When she glances at Ali’s, they’re in much the same shape. They look utterly misplaced against the backdrop of civility surrounding them. “Which makes me wonder,” she says faintly, “why you were following me in the first place.”

Silence ensues.

“...well,” James says with all the wariness of someone tiptoeing around a hibernating bear. “That’s certainly a good question. I’ll leave Ali to answer that one while I clean up. Don’t get up, you’re the guest, I’ll take care of it.”

Before Roxy can blink, James jumps out of his seat and burdens his arms with as many plates as possible, beating a hasty retreat to the kitchen. Roxy and Ali stare at him with incredulity and outrage, respectively.

Now bearing the brunt of her questioning accusation, Ali clears his throat and fidgets only briefly in his seat before he seems to catch himself. “The truth is, Roxy, I’ve always been keeping an eye out for you, ever since you were little.”

It’s not quite the answer she expected, certainly not one she fully understands. The more she thinks about it, the greater (and more frightening) the implications. “Me? Why? How? Are you _stalking_ me?”

“What? _No_ ,” Ali forcefully refutes, offended. “Let’s just say I work in government these days. It’s a position with great oversight and resources at my disposal, but also one that can carry with it...risks. Not just for me, but anyone connected to me as well. Therefore, it became imperative certain people—like family members and loved ones—be monitored. Not because they had done anything wrong, but just in case.”

“Just in case? Just in case what?”

“Just in case someone wanted to use them for leverage or revenge.”

Roxy stares at him, floored. By all appearances, she would never think her mild-mannered, bespectacled cousin is some sort of...some sort of what? Government official? No. An agent? A _spook_? “Are you...do you work for MI5?” And off Ali’s continued blank expression, “...MI6?”

“Sorry, Roxy, I’m afraid that’s classified.”

Which just about answers the question anyway. Now that she knows what to look for—the poise, the muscular frame, the wounds on his hands, the bland, almost obscure features of his face that would actually be ideal for not being noticed—it starts to seem less and less ridiculous. “Is that what happened last night? Someone tried to get to me to—”

“No,” Ali says again. “No, last night wasn’t because of your connection to me. That one was just an entitled prick who won’t be doing that to anyone ever again.”

The way he says it, with little emotion and a hard glint in his eye, like it’s as simple as a fact, should be chilling. Instead, Roxy finds herself fascinated. His words had been such an understated show of...something. Confidence? Satisfaction? True power?

Whatever it is, she wants it.

She wants it like she’s never wanted anything before in her life, to feel that way, or maybe, in the wake of having only narrowly escaped a much worse fate, to know what it’s like to be without that fear.

“Thank you,” she tells him, meaning it.

The ice in his gaze melts away and something warmer takes its place. He smiles at her. “You’re my family. Well, what’s willingly left of it.”

But Roxy just shakes her head in disgust at herself. “I didn’t even keep in touch, not even after leaving home. I should have done, but I didn’t even think about it….” The shame of her thoughtlessness hits her in full force. She has her parents, her mates, uni, her thoughts of the future to preoccupy her mind. Ali lost so much of that when he was cast out of the family, even losing the close confidante he once had in Roxy’s mother.

“I’m not upset, Roxy. I exited your life at an early age. What choice had you but to simply get on with it?”

“I don’t know,” Roxy admits. “I just feel...regret. Ten years. And you were keeping watch over me all this time?”

“Well, not for all of it,” Ali amends. “But a fair bit.”

 _Was it lonely?_ she wants to ask. To watch someone and never be able to make contact, especially not after what her parents threatened to do to him that awful night, warning him to stay away or else. “And James? Is he...does he know that you’re...you do what you do?”

“James works with me, same...position, you could say,” Ali carefully says.

From the kitchen where he was most certainly eavesdropping, James, after deciding the worst of it has passed, turns on the radio. Faint music drifts back into the dining room, too low for Roxy to get a proper listen of it.

But then comes James’s voice singing along, or rather, painfully striving to do so. It’s bloody awful.

Ali looks utterly vexed, but the smile that tips the corners of his mouth up is as soft as the fondness that shines in his eyes. He looks happy. Must be true love, that.

Roxy smiles. “Sounds complicated.”

 

_____

 

The agreed upon coordinates lead them to a nearly empty square in the middle of a residential district that is guarded on all sides by towering apartment blocks. There’s plenty of cover in the form of columns and awnings, and several escape routes.

Roxy chooses to make her nest in an empty flat on the second storey with what should have been clear sightlines to the square below, but it’s still bloody humid out, and a thick smog settles heavily over the city today, wafting in and out of the square like a drifting sheet.

“How’s visibility?” Gazelle asks, sounding intimately close through Roxy’s earpiece.

Roxy sights Gazelle through the scope. She’s down in the square, feet wedged into first position subconsciously, spine straight and alert. A messenger bag containing their half of Valentine’s research is securely hung across her chest.

Then another wall of fog slowly creeps in and renders her an obscure dark shape in the mist.

“Absolutely shit. I’m nearly blind at times.”

“We’ll just have to make do.”

“I’d be more comfortable on the ground,” Roxy says.

“It’s better to let him think I am working alone.” Neither calls attention to the fact that it is also more advantageous for Gazelle should she attempt to pull a runner. “I think I see something.”

Roxy tries to canvas the area, but it isn’t until they’re practically on top of Gazelle that the smog dissipates enough for her to see: six men in total, five heavily-built guards armed with assault rifles and a tall slender man in a well-tailored suit carrying a briefcase who must be Stephen. From what Roxy can make out, Stephen is at least in his forties, though he wears his age as well as his wealth. His skin is smooth and unlined. His jaw is attractively sharp. His thick head of dark hair is shaped by an expensive haircut. He’s undeniably handsome, in possession of a flashy elegance that shows how aware he is of how he appears to the rest of the world.

She thinks that his smiles could dazzle, but right now, his lips are set in a firm, grim line as he casually saunters up to Gazelle, seemingly leaving caution to his anxious guards.

“Gazelle,” Roxy hears him say. He eyes the loose sleeve that is tied off at her right shoulder, then her perfectly average boots. “It appears recent events haven’t left you completely unscathed.”

“Occasional hazards of actually doing the work yourself instead of paying people to do everything for you,” Gazelle says.

Through the scope, she sees Stephen’s lip curl into a sneer. “Well, I find having two hands makes it easier to fetch notes from my wallet when tipping the help.”

Roxy can’t see Gazelle’s face, but she notes the way her foot shifts ever so slightly back, like she’s ready to launch herself at him. Her head tilts. She’s undoubtedly firming her jaw. “As fun as it is to catch up, I’m here for a reason. Show me you have it. All of it.”

Surprisingly, Stephen doesn’t argue, merely sighing before opening his briefcase and pulling out a shorn strip of familiar-looking papers. “And yours?”

Gazelle mirrors his actions, retrieving her half from the messenger bag. They eye each other’s half closely, and Roxy can’t quite make out if what Stephen brought is the real deal, but Gazelle seems satisfied.

“So we’ve now established that each has what the other wants,” Stephen says. “Don’t look at me like that. I never believed for a second you would want to join forces, Gazelle. Now, let’s make this easy for everyone. Hand over your half, and we can both go our separate ways.”

The guards take this as their cue to raise their rifles and point them at Gazelle, the loud click of simultaneous bullets being loaded into chambers echoing across the emptiness of the square.

Gazelle doesn’t flinch. “What makes you think that I can’t kill you before any one of your goons so much as pulls the trigger?”

Roxy’s finger slides to the trigger, centreing her crosshairs on the chest of the guard who looks the most antsy.

“Oh, come on, Gazelle, you’re hardly what you used to be,” Stephen says. “And it was stupid of you to come alone.” 

“Get down when I say so,” Roxy whispers.

“Who says I’m alone?” Gazelle asks, and Roxy takes a steadying breath, praying the fog will hold back a little longer….

A shot rings out.

Roxy watches, uncomprehending, as Gazelle jerks back and a spray of blood bursts from her left shoulder, her sharp cry starkly cutting through Roxy’s earpiece.

She retraces the bullet’s trajectory across the square with her scope, encountering nothing but dull grey fog until the plume miraculously drifts away just enough to reveal—

Eggsy. _Shit_.

There’s a dark anger set into his jaw, flared nostrils, hard eyes. He’s already re-aiming when Stephen’s men recover from their confusion and automatically turn their rifles at the newcomer to return fire, forcing Eggsy to quickly duck out of the window he was perched in.

Roxy has little choice but to aim for the first guard in her sights and take him out with a clean shot through the heart. The next goes down just as quickly before the rest scatter for cover, realising they’re caught between two enemy points of fire.

Eggsy takes advantage of the brief respite to return to the window and take aim at Gazelle again, but a quick warning shot from Roxy splinters the wood frame a scant few centimetres from his head.

He flinches back, eyeing Roxy from across the square with an expression torn between hurt and disbelief. His mouth moves. She can practically hear him say it. _Roxy!_

 _I’m sorry, Eggsy_. She silently wills him to understand, chancing a quick glance at the ground just in time to see Stephen running for the nearest exit, briefcase and Gazelle’s messenger bag in hand, before one of the remaining guards sends a spray of bullets her way and forces her to drop back down to the floor.

There are sounds of fighting on the other end of the comms, fists and kicks impacting with flesh, feet scrabbling across the pavement, grunts of exertion and pain. Roxy crawls across the floor to the adjacent window, closing her eyes for a moment, before readying her rifle and bringing it up to bear.

It’s foggy again, but she can make out two grappling figures. When the mist thins out even further, she sees Gazelle strike the guard’s solar plexus, stomach, and groin in rapid succession, bowling him over to garner a knee to the face. But instead of going down easily, he only stumbles back, blood streaming from his nose in a red sheet, and throws a punch at Gazelle, catching her beneath the chin and whipping her to the ground.

Before he can follow up, Roxy puts two bullets in his chest. He reels back, then collapses to the ground just as a new wave of fog rolls in like the end of an act. “Are you alright?” she asks.

“Fine,” comes the strained answer, which is undercut by a low groan.“It’s just a graze. I spotted something and moved just in time or I wouldn’t be talking to you right now. Was that sniper his?”

“Not as such,” Roxy admits.

But Gazelle is too preoccupied to question her. “That bastard has both halves now. I couldn’t stop him.”

Roxy can’t think about it now. Her gaze is rapt upon the blank grey wall below her, trying to pierce through the opaque mist for any flicker of movement. “There are still two more men down there. Can you see them from where you are?”

After several beats filled with heavy, pained breaths, Gazelle says, “Behind the northwest planters. Your two o’clock.”

Roxy pivots her rifle and waits. The mist silently rolls between the buildings like smoke off a battlefield. She counts the seconds in her head, timed to the slow and steady beat of her heart. Listens to the whoosh of air entering her lungs and leaving past her lips.

Steady.

The world gradually begins to fade back in, first in dark impressions of shapes, then their unyielding edges.

Roxy forces herself to wait. Be still.

There’s a flicker of movement, the round shape of a human head peering up from behind his cover, a gun brought up to bear.

She squeezes the trigger and he goes down. The bullet casing clinks against the window frame—

—then she swiftly dives for cover as the last guard sends a barrage of thundering firepower her way, shattering the glass of the window and raining its shards down over her.

And then it stops.

It takes her a few more moments to realise it’s her heart pounding in her ears and not some prolonged assault. The silence is deafening.

When she cautiously glances out the jagged remains of the window, she sees Eggsy half-hanging out of the building across the square in that mind-bogglingly limber way he has, a thin trail of smoke streaming from the barrel of his gun and the last guard splayed out over the cobblestones atop a spreading pool of blood.

Sensing her eyes on him, he looks up and meets her gaze unhappily, his promising an imminent discussion neither one of them is going to like.


	5. Chapter 5

“What the _fuck_ do you think you’re doing, Rox? Protecting Gazelle?”

“Eggsy, it’s not what you think. There’s a reason—”

“Oh, yeah? Let’s hear it then!”

“If you would just let me finish one goddamn sentence!”

They stare at each other like adversaries, cheeks flushed, eyes bright with anger. It’s already raining again, steamy and hot, contributing to their foul tempers. Wisps of hair curl out of her hair grips into frightful flyaways. His brow is covered with a thin sheen of perspiration.

Eggsy, restless when he’s frustrated, springs into an angry back and forth prowl like a caged tiger. His jaw is clenched so hard she can see the tick in his cheek every time he grinds his teeth.

Roxy strives to keep her voice calm. “I didn’t know Gazelle was alive. I was originally sent out to fetch a body for Merlin so everything could be accounted for.”

“Who never bloody told me any of this,” Eggsy growls, flinty look promising the man in question would be on the receiving end of a few words.

“You’re too close to it,” Roxy says, then almost rolls her eyes. “ _As evidenced_.”

“That still don’t explain how you go from looking for a body to protecting a mass murderer.”

He levels the term at her like an accusation, each syllable as precise as an arrow slung with unerring aim. They might as well be for how she has to brace herself against each instinctive flinch. “She told me that Valentine’s research was still out in the wild, which meant the possibility of his tech being re-created. She would only show me where it was herself. No one else. So I made a decision.”

“Against Merlin’s orders? So now you’re what? AWOL? Kingsman’s gonna hunt you down,” Eggsy concludes, probably quite accurately. She was lucky enough to get him to put away his glasses, but she knows the tracker within them means their time here would have to be cut short. “What does any of this have to do with my target?”

“We didn’t know he was the same man you were tailing.” And more fool she was for it. Of all the bloody people in the apparently too small, post-Valentine world…. “He’s Valentine’s silent business partner. He had one half of Valentine’s research, we had the other. We were trying to make a deal.”

“And you didn’t think she wasn’t gonna try and run off with both of them the first chance she got?”

“That wasn’t going to happen,” Roxy says flatly. “I don’t trust her that much, Eggsy.”

“Yet you trust her over Merlin.”

And that’s the rub, isn’t it? Roxy can’t meet his eyes, which she imagines are too big and too vulnerable with all his bruised confusion. “There...there wasn’t much time.”

Except maybe there was. In hindsight, Gazelle made it seem imperative they secure the research before Stephen could, but Stephen would never have obtained the other half had they not practically served it up to him on a silver platter.

Yet if she could do it all over again, Roxy isn’t so sure she wouldn’t make the exact same choice. “They were going to torture the location out of her. She’d just spent months being interrogated by the Russians already. The only way this was going to happen was if I let her go.”

“Well, it’s good to see Kingsman isn’t completely hopeless,” Gazelle says as she staggers into the room. There’s a contusion forming around her eye and across her jaw, a thick crimson gash cutting into her lower lip. “Unless the boy’s wounded feelings are going to get infected, I suggest we clean and dress mine.”

Immediately, Eggsy stops in his tracks and tenses, looking like he’d love nothing more than to have a rematch. 

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Gazelle, _shut up_ ,” Roxy hisses, even as she moves to tend to Gazelle’s wound, pushing the blood-stained material of her shirt down past her shoulder and most of her arm. Earlier, she had tied a scrap of fabric around it to stem the bleeding, and there is just a sluggish ooze now. Fortunately, the graze isn’t too deep, but it would still require stitches.

Gazelle gives her an affronted look before coolly regarding Eggsy. “Why? It was his fault Stephen now has all Valentine’s research, barrelling in like some dumb ape.”

“Gazelle….”

Eggsy steps forward threateningly. “You wanna have another go, is it? You only had a little taste last time, how’s about more? Should get the job done proper—”

“Eggsy!” Roxy snaps, forcing him to shut his mouth and reclaim his distance. “None of this is helping, alright? Right now, we’ve got to think of a plan to get that research back before it can be used.”

“We don’t need her for that,” Eggsy says. “We get Merlin involved, put her away in a cage where she belongs, and we do this ourselves.”

Gazelle scoffs. “You’ve been trailing Stephen around like a hungry dog begging for scraps. Until today, you didn’t even know how he was connected to Valentine.”

“Cheers for the introductions then!” Eggsy says with a mocking grimace. “Still don’t mean you’re necessary anymore.”

Roxy can feel the way Gazelle trembles beneath her hands, so much so that she has to pause her sutures. “Eggsy, please….”

“No, Rox.” Eggsy holds up a hand and shakes his head, sparing her a look of disgust and desperation. “You’ve gotta give me more than this. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t bring in the rest of Kingsman right here, right now.”

Roxy stares at him imploringly, but she doesn’t know how else she can convince him of something she can hardly trust herself.

“Because your Daddy agent is still alive, and I’m the only one who knows where he is.”

Roxy and Eggsy freeze, staring at Gazelle with twin expressions of shock. The suture needle slips out of Roxy’s fingers, saved from falling to the floor by the thread still woven through Gazelle’s flesh.

It’s Eggsy who recovers first. “What the fuck did you just say?”

“I never knew his real name. Tall. Long legs. The one in Kentucky?” Gazelle rattles off, each description transforming into a darker expression on Eggsy’s face. “He’s not dead.”

“How?” Roxy asks.

“You’re lying,” Eggsy snarls.

“I can prove it.”

“ _How_ ,” Roxy demands.

“Valentine wouldn’t look at the body. He had to be rushed back to the car. I checked. He was still breathing.” Gazelle meets Roxy’s eyes. “So I made a decision. He’s in a private facility, put into a medically induced coma last time I checked...granted that was some time ago. For all I know, he could be dead and incinerated by now—”

Eggsy is a blur streaking across the room, rushing Gazelle and yanking her out of the chair to slam her against the wall as Roxy’s suture kit and tray clatter to the floor. “Where is he? You’re going to tell me right the fuck now, or I swear to God I’m gonna—”

“Eggsy, stop!” Roxy shouts, grabbing one of his wrists to bend his whole arm back and shifting her weight to upend his balance and flip him down to the floor. She’s got a knee to his throat, arm still locked between her thighs, preventing him from moving without dislocating his shoulder.

“She’s lying!” Eggsy hisses, struggling in vain to free himself from her punishing grip but too out of sorts to do so effectively with his eyes only for Gazelle. “I saw the whole thing! I watched you shoot Harry! I _saw_ it! I saw him….”

His struggles weaken into shaking with racking sobs that seem like they’re being strangled out of him. Roxy immediately releases him, alarmed, as he curls up on the floor and wraps his arms over his head like he’s protecting himself from one of Dean’s blows. He once told her how they liked to gang up on him all at once, raining down fists and feet from all angles so that all he could do was just try and keep the most vital parts of himself as undamaged as possible.

“Oh, Eggsy…” she whispers, laying a palm across his shaking shoulder, then sliding up behind him to wrap her arms around his middle, holding him tight as he shudders against her.

From where she’s slumped against the wall, needle and thread still hanging off her half-stitched up wound, Gazelle stares down at them, expression unreadable. After a moment she pulls her phone from her pocket, wincing as the gesture pulls at her injury, but nevertheless dials a number.

She must have set it to speakerphone, because the rings blare out through the room, quieting Eggsy’s sobs to softer gasps.

Then the rings stop as someone picks up. “Hello?” American male. Light Texas accent maybe.

“It’s me,” Gazelle says.

“...Ms Gazelle? You’re alive! It’s been so long, we started to think y’all went down with the signal.”

Gazelle almost rolls her eyes. “Well, it would appear I didn’t. I need you to do something. No questions. The man that was brought in on V-Day, what’s his status?”

“Wh...he’s still here. Still unconscious, though just about as healed as he’s gonna get. He’s—”

“Show him to me. Just him.”

“...yes, ma’am.”

There’s a light rustling on the other end and then the screen suddenly lights up, its illumination washing out Gazelle’s face. She stares down at her phone, unmoving, until she’s satisfied with what she’s looking at, then at last holds it out to Roxy. “The proof you need. Look.”

Roxy warily eyes the phone before reaching out to take it.

She can’t really distinguish if the man she’s looking at is Harry Hart. She never really saw Eggsy’s mentor except in brief glimpses of past recordings or images that Eggsy showed her from Kingsman’s records. Even in those, Harry’s Kingsman-issued glasses dominated his face and, as are their intention, made his real features hard to recall.

The older man on the small screen in her hand is pale, his features are lax, making him seem younger than he would be. A breathing tube obscures half of his lower face and a large bandage covers the upper left quarter, including his eye. A chorus of machines that can’t be seen—that push air in and out of Harry’s lungs, that track the steady beat of his heart, the occasional grind of another checking his blood pressure—plays lightly in the background.

“Eggsy, here,” she urges, gently pushing the phone between Eggsy’s arms, coaxing him to see.

She knows the moment when he must finally look. His whole body stiffens beneath hers; he sucks in a breath and doesn’t release it.

The phone is snatched from her hands as Eggsy brings it close to his face, his red, swollen eyes practically squinting, trying to discern if what he’s seeing is real. At some point even he can’t deny the truth any longer, because Eggsy doesn’t look away, just stares, unblinking.

Then he reaches a finger out to touch the screen, but only hovers over it instead like he’s afraid to shatter the illusion. “ _Harry_.”

Roxy releases a breath and practically sags on top of him. She lifts her head to look at Gazelle, knowing her curiosity is transparent on her face. She doesn’t care. Everything is so off-kilter and confusing right now.

Gazelle is quick to bring sober reality crashing back down upon them. 

“This is why you won’t call Kingsman,” she says. “Not if you want to see your Harry in person ever again.”

 

_____

 

They make it to Shanghai at three in the morning, managing to book a room in a third-rate hotel that faces a wall of brightly glowing billboards atop the adjacent building. It’s not as far as Roxy would have liked to get from a place Kingsman was likely going through with a fine-tooth comb at that very moment (they left most of Eggsy’s Kingsman gear there, including his suit, which Roxy knew had trackers woven into the lining), but it would have to do for the time being.

Roxy puts a curiously pliant and uncharacteristically quiet Eggsy straight to bed, tucking him beneath the blankets and pulling the blackout curtains firmly shut in the bedroom so that the blazing light only bled around the gaping edges. His complicity had no longer been in doubt after seeing Harry.

Guilt frays a little more at the tattered ends of her moral fabric. Just a little bit more. 

She finds Gazelle wedged onto the pitiful excuse of their balcony, a wrought-iron fenced ledge that barely juts out a metre from the sliding doors. The shifting billboard lights paint them in changing swaths of vivid colour, from blue to red to yellow as some inane beauty advertisement cycles through the large screen. There’s a clear glass bottle within reach—strawberry saké, Roxy sees when she picks it up to examine it.

With a sigh of resignation, she puts the bottle to her lips and swallows down a mouthful, grimacing at the cloying sweet taste for the sake of the pleasant burn on her tongue. She takes a seat on the ground opposite Gazelle, slotting their legs together like puzzle pieces in the negligible amount of space.

“Why?”

Gazelle turns to look at her, arching a brow in question, though Roxy is certain she already knows.

“Why did you keep Harry alive, especially after going to so much trouble trying to kill him?”

Gazelle looks away once more as if disinterested in the entire question. She doesn’t reply for a long time. Roxy is just beginning to think she never will when she at long last says, “Isn’t that enough?” 

Roxy’s brows furrow.

“So much effort to kill a man who refuses to die,” Gazelle says. “Not even a shot to the head could do it. I looked into his face, after. There was so much fierce will there still. I can recognise a survivor when I see one.”

“And if he wakes up one day and decides to hunt you down?” Roxy presses.

Paradoxically, Gazelle smiles. “Well, you can’t say I didn’t have it coming.”

Roxy frowns, not able to comprehend Gazelle’s actions. Perhaps more of Valentine rubbed off on her than she thought. “It wouldn’t just be Harry, you know.”

“You mean the boy.”

“He’s no longer a boy, not really,” Roxy says. “You and Valentine saw to that.”

Gazelle considers this as she leans forward and plucks the bottle from where it is cradled in Roxy’s hand. “Maybe not. Maybe I helped to end his whole world. He acts like I did.” She takes a contemplative sip. “If so, then he certainly returned the favour. By all rights, we should be even.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“It’s how it used to work. Hammurabi Code. Eye for an eye. Or, in this case, an arm.” 

Roxy’s eyes inevitably travel to the missing limb. “Did you love him?” No need to specify this time. There is only ever one _him_ for which she would dare to use the word _love_ with Gazelle.

“As a father, maybe,” Gazelle says. “A brother. A mentor. Protector. Saviour. Just not like how your _Eggsy_ loves this Harry.”

“Harry was to Eggsy as Valentine was to you. That...something more hadn’t happened yet. Maybe, though, had there been the time.” Roxy always knew it by the wistful longing Eggsy didn’t think his voice held every time he spoke of him.

“I suppose I would have fought as fiercely as he did had our positions been reversed,” Gazelle says, twisting the neck of the almost-empty bottle between her fingers to stir up the liquid within. “But you’re right. Life isn’t fair. He gets to have his back.”

“Considering yours tried to end the world, I’d rather have Harry back too.”

Gazelle looks up at her, but Roxy refuses to back down, only quirking a brow in return. Something about the gesture must amuse Gazelle because she only sits back, small smile toying at the corners of her wide mouth. “And what about you? Who is your world?”

Roxy blinks, caught off-guard. “No one. I’m not really concerned about things like that right now.”

“Not even the fiance, once upon a time?”

“No. That was never….” Roxy pauses, finding herself _flushing_ with embarrassment, for fuck’s sake. She might be overcompensating when she stiffly explains, “I was too busy to worry about relationships. I had other things to focus on.”

“Like what?” Gazelle persists.

“Like school,” Roxy says. “And family. And, and...my career.” It sounds pathetic once she voices it aloud.

“Really.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Roxy hisses.

Gazelle narrows her eyes at Roxy, like there’s something she can’t quite figure out. “Have you ever even had sex?”

“ _What?_ ” Roxy’s voice may have hit a whole new hereto unknown register.

“With your fiance? Or anyone?”

“Of course!” Roxy immediately replies, offended by the intrusive line of questioning, apropos of bloody nothing. “With my fiance, I mean. _Ex_ -fiance. Not just...anyone.”

“Just one man? Ever?” Gazelle looks positively floored.

“So? We were together all throughout my teens, you know. It’s not like I was just going to sleep around on him.”

Gazelle shrugs dismissively. “Sounds boring.”

“It wasn’t! It was fine.”

“Fine.”

“Yes, _fine_ ,” Roxy says. “Stop...repeating everything I say like it’s wrong.”

She forgets how fast Gazelle is capable of moving when she wants to, rolling to her knees between Roxy’s legs, slamming her hand against the concrete wall right next to Roxy’s head and making her flinch.

Gazelle snaps her head forward, stopping just centimetres away from Roxy’s face, so close, Roxy can feel see her pupils expand, smell the sweetness on her breath, feel the heat emanating off her skin. Between her legs, Gazelle’s body is all warm, lithe muscle and soft skin. The blood roars so loudly in her ears that she almost misses Gazelle’s words.

“Sounds like _you_ were bored.”

Then just as quickly as she leaned in, Gazelle backs away and stands up, hair swung over her shoulder behind her. The way she looks down at Roxy—eyes hooded, the brown beneath them blazing—leaves her speechless. Long after Gazelle moves back inside, the heat of her body still lingers along the insides of her thighs.

 

_____

 

She only sleeps with Tommy because it is expected of her more than out of any real desire to, she only realises the first time he’s inside of her. Expectations of being this far along in the relationship, the stage after kissing and groping hands and a chore of blowjobs out behind the stables (first conducted out of curiosity, then a sense of challenge, and now they are all rather tedious). Expectations of being a hormone-driven teenager, of being a woman for a man.

It’s not that she regrets it. She doesn’t. Roxy always saw virginity as something to get on with so that more, hopefully interesting, experiences could be had. It’s just that from the constant stream of narratives surrounding this vaunted act that was supposed to change her forever—girl to woman, pure to fallen—she honestly expected more.

More rapturous bliss. More transcendence. More wisdom, like all the secrets of the universe were supposed to be unlocked to her now that has she spread her legs.

Instead, it is Tommy above her, pinning her between his knees as he thrusts repeatedly into her body, almost mindlessly, like a rutting dog.

From this angle, the expression on Tommy’s face, mouth hanging open, features vaguely scrunched up in concentration, resembles that of one who’s overindulged in too many sedatives.

The air smells acrid, mostly of him, his musk. It makes her gag, which she manages to mask with an authentic, if perhaps not for the right reason, moan at the last second.

Tommy is bony but tall, deceptively heavy beneath his whipcord thin frame. The force he wields to drive into her punches the breath from her lungs in a way she supposes sounds alluringly sexy. Her bed is making a distracting series of rhythmic squeaks in sync with his small tormented-sounding grunts.

Just when she thinks he’ll roughly plow into her all night and that she ought to have put a book within reach, he tenses up and groans into her neck, not unlike having a seizure.

“Oh, babe, that was amazing, you’re amazing,” Tommy slurs once his climax tapers off into puppyish whimpers, lifting his head to plant sloppy kisses along her face. “Did you come?”

The word still makes her blush, though she supposes she’s a blushing virgin no more. “Oh...yes. Very much so,” Roxy says, trying to muster up a thin veil of enthusiasm in her voice. “Thank you.”

“Good.” Exhausted as he is, Tommy hardly seems to notice as he pulls out and lazily tosses the condom into the bin without even tying it off. “I love you,” he sighs before smothering her with half his body and promptly falling asleep.

She manages to wriggle out from under his vice and takes stock of herself now that the deed has been done. What’s different now. How she feels.

Mostly: a bit wet. And pungent. No one told her how rank it all would smell.

Not too much blood. What little there is, she takes care of with a bit of Kleenex.

It hurt, being pried open like that with something wide and blunt, but then, everyone said it would and that it wasn’t unbearable, like the jab of a needle or the pinch of new shoes at her heels. A necessary pain; a ritual. It would be worth it.

The afterwards part, however—when everyone said she would feel closer to her partner than ever before, something irrevocably changed about her and him, that it would be special and wondrous—never manifested.

 _So that was sex_ , she thinks, unsure if she’s disappointed by how vastly underwhelming it is or nominally accomplished that she can at least cross one more milestone off her list. It still aches between her legs, a pulsing, tender throb like a healing bruise, but nothing more than she could handle, nor is the sensation acute enough to indicate possible further damage.

Now that this last barrier of their relationship has been breached, Roxy considers whether it would be something she could tolerate going forward. It occurs to her that perhaps all the warnings and safeguards surrounding a girl’s virginity weren’t so much about the concern for purity rather than a warning. He’ll want this again, and if she didn’t give it to him, she’d be considered unreasonable.

After all, she couldn’t very well put the toothpaste back once it’s out of the tube, as her mother was ever so fond of saying.

So on one hand, sex is rather bothersome. And vaguely disgusting, she decides, feeling her skin itch with the desire to wash off Tommy’s sweat and scent. She would have to launder her sheets now that they stink as well. It would be costly and time consuming to have to maintain this new factor in her life.

On the other, vaginal penetration requires less effort than giving head, where it sometimes feels like her whole jaw is going to fall off, and at least she doesn’t have to gargle mouthwash afterwards to scald her tongue of the bitter taste of semen.

 _Lie back and think of England_ , it is.

 

_____

 

“Stephen Wang. Forty-two. Sole owner of V-Corp with sizable stakes in about a dosen other entities. Worth somewhere in the low billions today, but that figure will rise once he finds a way to make something profitable of his latest inheritance.” For something that used to be as dear to her as her own baby, Gazelle is a consummate professional now, tone measured in her even delivery of the facts, but Roxy knows better. “And that’s just his legal activities.”

They have to huddle around Gazelle’s small laptop screen like children eager to hear a bedtime story, probably the closest they have all ever been in each other’s proximity without murderous intent. Stephen’s headshot flashes across the screen, a professional one judging by the business-like gradient backdrop and seven-figure suit he wears as he alpha poses, chest puffed out and arms folded smugly. 

“He has the means and connections to hide anywhere on this fucking planet if he wants,” Eggsy points out. He’s all in now, even eager to finish it, shoulders angled forward, practically straining at the lead like a bloodthirsty hound. “And if he’s got Valentine’s research, he’ll be looking to recreate himself a prototype as soon as possible.” 

Gazelle shakes her head. “He won’t have left the country. All of our manufacturing capabilities are located here.”

“But they’ve all been shut down by the UN pending further investigation, which could drag out for months, probably years,” Roxy says. “And he’ll not only have to find another manufacturer, but also source all the components from scratch.”

Gazelle begins typing, her hand flying across the screen with ease, though the small line between her brows unmasks her frustration. It probably takes her twice as long than what she’s used to. On the screen emerge several files parading columns of numbers, bank statements, invoices….

“You—” Roxy starts, recognising some of them.

“—hacked into the UN servers? It’s not difficult,” Gazelle says. “Besides, they’ve helpfully centralised our financial records.”

“So, what, are you trying to see if this bloke’s left a paper trail to another evil secret mountain lair?” Eggsy asks derisively.

“Nothing so ridiculous as that,” Gazelle dismisses. Eggsy scoffs. When the screen finally stills, it displays a spreadsheet that doesn’t appear all that different from any other invoice or forecast, but then again, numbers aren’t Roxy’s strong suit. “When in doubt, follow the money. Yes, our manufacturers are out, as well as our tier one suppliers, but that’s where the supply chain starts getting murky. I doubt the UN’s figured out our tier two’s and three’s yet. They’ve got to compel those kinds of things with court orders. I, however, already did it months ago. The list is here if one knows where to look in the usual mess a massive global corporation’s finances leave behind.”

“Head of Procurement as well as Chief Slicer and Dicer, were we?” Roxy mutters.

“Valentine wanted to make sure our suppliers were socially responsible entities.” Off Roxy and Eggsy’s incredulous looks, she adds, exasperated, “I told him that would have been ultimately hypocritical when one needs to mine rare metals and other finite, non-recyclable elements to make one’s products, but can’t fault a man for trying.”

“Oh, I think we still can,” Eggsy says flatly.

Gazelle ignores him, pausing when she finds the file she is looking for: a vast list of supplier sites, the things they supply, and the list of companies they supply to. “Valentine’s tech requires rare materials that are only provided by some of the companies on this list. We watch their financials….”

Eggsy sits back and folds his arms, reluctantly impressed. “Track where the goods are being sent….”

“And we find Stephen,” Roxy finishes.

Gazelle’s grin is positively feral. Roxy can’t say she doesn’t understand the feeling. “Precisely.”

 

_____

 

“And just why are we doing this again if it’s got nothing to do with our main goal of tracking down Wang?” Eggsy finally breaks down and asks when the cacophony and glittering sheen of Shanghai’s business centre falls away into the impoverished and more neglected Old Town.

Honestly, Roxy’s impressed. He held out for at least two hours this time before giving in to his peevishness.

“Because you need all the help you can get to take him out and right now, all you have is me,” says Gazelle without so much as turning her head or pausing her swift, focused steps. It’s all that Eggsy and Roxy can do to follow her lead, unsure of where they’re heading. Gazelle refuses to divulge their ultimate destination. “Which means we need more supplies and reinforcements.”

The irritating fact is that Gazelle isn’t exactly wrong and hasn’t been far off the target since this whole insane journey started. It’s amazing how much Roxy previously took for granted as an agent, having been so utterly dependent on Kingsman and Merlin for everything outside of literally pulling the trigger: money, background context, logistics, intel, identification, equipment, technical support. Even the resources they recovered from Algiers only carried them so far.

They only have themselves now.

Temperature-wise, it shouldn’t be that bad, but the thick humidity makes the air stifling, making her feel permanently clammy in a way that is significantly worse than English damp. The thought makes her actually miss the brisk cold precision of Moscow, or more honestly, the gentle mildness of home.

It’s quieter here without the wide streets and traffic. Produce stalls bearing plump fruit and vegetables tempt Roxy’s eye. Grime tarnishes the sides of buildings made from weathered cement blocks, rusting corrugated steel sheets, and decaying wood with faded signs. Laundry lines are strung like banners high up in the air across the roads. There’s still, sometimes, the bones of Shanghai’s old architecture to be found along the roof awnings and down narrow, overlooked alleys. Old Town is less like a slice of preserved time than it is a place time forgot.

Which makes it an ideal location to maintain yet another secret bolthole. Gazelle stops before a wrought-iron gated door that would have otherwise been indistinguishable from the rest of the entrances on the street and bangs her fist against it, causing a loud enough racket to garner a few annoyed passing glances.

“Shénme?!” comes a muffled, equally irritable reply from within.

“Open up!” Gazelle orders.

In seconds, the door opens to reveal a boy who couldn’t possibly be older than his late teens, glancing at Roxy and Eggsy warily before his eyes land on Gazelle and widen. “Not dead?”

“Did you think it was going to be that easy?” Gazelle asks before pushes him aside to step through the door.

Roxy and Eggsy share a look. “If only,” Eggsy mutters before he, too, follows.

Inside looks like...well, it looks like an unsupervised teenage boy lives here. Dishes piled high in the sink. Empty takeaway containers over every surface. Multiple video consoles and game boxes.

“We pay him to live on the ground floor,” Gazelle says before Roxy can ask or Eggsy can make a smart remark. “Less suspicious to the locals. Prevents squatters from trying to break in. Kid agent stays downstairs and keeps watch.”

“ _Not a kid_.” Eggsy frowns, his jaw clenching in a telltale sign of a forthcoming incensed remark.

“And upstairs?” Roxy asks, smoothly cutting in while placing a placating hand on Eggsy’s tense arm.

 _Leave it_ , she pleads with her eyes. Eggsy looks unhappy but he purses his lips to keep them shut.

Upstairs behind another thick door heavily secured with more biometric safeguards is a lab Merlin would probably salivate over: modern, sleek, and clean, filled with sophisticated looking tech for which Roxy can’t even begin to discern the functions.

“You have more burrows than a rodent,” Roxy says under her breath, trying to school her features into not looking like an awed child.

“Why do you think billionaires are always considered flight risks?” Gazelle asks.

“I was thinking you were leading us to a place that had more in the way of weapons and ammo.”

“I’m leading you to the best weapon you’ve got,” Gazelle says before pulling open the doors to a cabinet to reveal a very familiar pair of bladed prosthetic feet.

“No, absolutely not,” Roxy flat out says, her gun out and already pointed at Gazelle in warning.

Gazelle briefly eyes Roxy over the gun, then without breaking her gaze, reaches lower to retrieve something else: wiry metal cords twisted around each other and ending in steel-like appendages—fingers. It’s a limb, or more precisely, a mechanical arm that appears to be missing its more human palatable cover.

Slowly, Roxy lowers her gun. She has never seen a prosthesis like it.

“I’ll need your help,” Gazelle says, holding it out to her.

She helps Gazelle remove her shirt, careful of her injuries, both old and recent. Her ribs aren’t giving her much trouble anymore, she notes. Less discolouration, easier movement. The scarring on the stump of her arm has faded some, the bones through her skin not quite so prominent. For a woman who dealt death over and over again and suffered grievous injuries of her own, most of her skin is otherwise silky smooth, free of scar or blemish.

Before realising what she’s doing, Roxy reaches out to trace the tips of her fingers across the expanse of Gazelle’s shoulder, only stopping herself at the last moment and swiftly retracting her hand. “You’re healing well,” she shakily says, unsettled by what she almost did.

But if Gazelle noticed, she doesn’t say anything, too busy with last-minute tweaks to the prosthetic arm laid out on the laboratory table before her. Beside it is an injection gun. Kingsman has something similar, usually for embedding intramuscular GPS chips and monitoring devices depending on how deep cover the mission is.

“Most prosthetics are for show rather than function. I never understood why, though I’ve been told the verisimilitude makes some amputees feel better,” Gazelle says. “The genius of Valentine was always to marry the ideas of both. Help me put this on.”

With Gazelle’s guidance, Roxy slips the straps of the prosthesis over Gazelle’s head and across her shoulders to fit the end of it to the stump of her arm, snapping and tightening the clasps across her chest. When she’s done, the metal prosthesis hangs just a little longer than Gazelle’s other arm, limp and unmoving by her side.

Roxy frowns. “How does it work?”

“That’s where this comes in.” Gazelle picks up the injector gun and holds it out to Roxy. “A neural implant will sync with my brainwaves to control the arm, just as a real brain would. You need to insert the chip as close to the brain stem as possible, preferably without killing me or causing permanent paralysis.”

“What?” Roxy practically recoils from the thing. “You can’t ask me to do that. I’m not...I’m not a medical professional!” 

“I can’t do it myself and I’m not letting kid agent anywhere near me with this thing. There’s no other way,” Gazelle insists, pushing the gun against Roxy and forcing her to grab it before it fell to the floor.

Roxy stares down at the gun in her hands. It’s very light, cool to touch. She wills her hands to stop shaking and squeezes the handle of it harder. “You should probably sit down.”

Gazelle acquiesces, taking a seat on the nearest stool. With a tilt of her head, she sweeps her hair over one shoulder to reveal the graceful nape of her neck. “Gloves and antiseptic wipes are on the table.”

“Right. Yes.” Roxy puts on a pair of latex gloves, tears open a package and gently runs the cool wipe across Gazelle’s skin along the area below her hairline. She tries to feel the ridges of Gazelle’s cervical spine with her fingers, pressing into her skin in upward circular motions, before taking a breath and placing the gun against her neck.

“Up higher, between C1 and C2,” Gazelle corrects.

Roxy closes her eyes and shifts the gun up one more vertebrae, pausing to see if Gazelle will correct her again, but Gazelle remains silent. “I can’t believe you’d want to install a chip in your head given what happened.”

“This is nothing like that. The chip only transmits, it doesn’t receive.”

“So you don’t feel sensation in the arm?”

“Maybe in later generations.” Unlikely though. They both know it. For once, Roxy feels a sense of regret that so much genius is now gone. What a waste of potential. “You’re stalling.”

“Fine. On the count of three.” She braces her other hand against Gazelle’s back, feeling the way the muscles involuntarily tense beneath it. “One...two….”

The syllable no sooner leaves her lips when she squeezes the trigger. There’s a hiss, both from the gun and between Gazelle’s teeth as she jerks slightly. Roxy fears for a moment that Gazelle will collapse in a boneless heap at her feet, but the other woman remains sitting upright, apparently still in full control of her body.

She practically throws the gun on the table and sags in relief. Thank God. “Did it work?”

Gazelle looks down at her metal arm, and Roxy finds herself holding her breath. For a moment, nothing happens. Gazelle’s brows furrow in concentration.

And then the metal fingers twitch.

As she curls them into a fist, Gazelle smiles victoriously, raising the metal arm, flexing it and stretching it seamlessly like a real one.

“Wow,” Roxy can’t help but breathe out in wonder.

“Best of all,” Gazelle says before she turns around and smashes her new hand against the metal table, leaving a wide indented crater in its wake. “It’s very strong. Very durable.”

The easy damage Gazelle demonstrates fills Roxy with a momentary unease, knowing Gazelle hardly needed the extra advantage to be that much more dangerous. “Is this all we came for then?”

“Since I know you won’t let me have my best weapons,” Gazelle says, and before Roxy can react, her metal hand cups Roxy’s cheek, causing Roxy to freeze, knowing how little it would take to crush her skull. “This will have to do.”

Those spindly fingers tickle her skin, but Gazelle only curls them like a caress before withdrawing and leaving Roxy’s personal space entirely, lingering touch still burning across her jaw.

“There’s some spare guns and ammo in the drawers,” Gazelle casually says, slipping her shirt back on and grabbing a bag to load up on other devices she deems useful while Roxy gathers her wits. “Might want to grab those.”

In a way, Roxy’s grateful for the task, using it to get her mind back into working order and re-centre herself. Still, damn Gazelle anyways. She throws a glare at her back for good measure.

Bags heavy with weaponry and supplies, they start for the stairs.

“We’re ready to go,” Roxy calls out ahead to Eggsy. “See? It wasn’t that long, even you can’t argue that.”

Only to be greeted by silence.

Sharing a concerned look with Gazelle, Roxy drops her bags and pulls out her gun, slowly making her way down the stairs, one step at a time, until the floor comes into view.

She first sees men fanned out around the room with heavy weapons and tactical gear. Both the kid and Eggsy are kneeling on the ground, hands behind their heads on account of the gun being pointed at them by Merlin.

“Agent Lancelot,” Merlin says, eyes hard and unhappy. “It’s good to finally have caught up with you. Why don’t you put the gun down, and then you, Galahad, and Gazelle are to come quietly.”

Roxy glances back up the stairs at Gazelle, who looks ready to tear her way through them all, the glinting defiance in her eyes resembling that of a cornered animal.

She turns her head to meet Eggsy’s grim stare and slight shake of his head. _Don’t be stupid, Rox_.

For a moment, she’s tempted, so tempted, to be just that. She’s come so far, after all. She can’t possibly give it all up now, not when she’s so close. Her mind already instinctively maps out her escape:

Bullet to Merlin’s shoulder, make him drop his gun.

Tuck her body in and take a hard tumble down the stairs to avoid the firepower that would surely puncture the walls behind her.

Eggsy, who wants her to give up, would nevertheless use the distraction to take down the two men closest to him. They are probably well-trained, but they aren’t Kingsman agents.

She’d come up out of her roll, bringing her gun round to shoot out the legs of two more, the one by the back window and refrigerator.

Gazelle would surely make it into range by then, bringing up her own weapon, except knowing her, she’d shoot to kill first and not to incapacitate—

And that would be it. Roxy has crossed so many lines already, but _that_ one would have really been it: a point of no return not yet known until now.

“Alright, I’m standing down.” Roxy spreads her arms wide and slowly lowers her gun to the floor in defeat. She can feel Gazelle’s stunned disbelief practically burning a hole through her skull. “I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t know to whom she’s apologising: Merlin, Eggsy, Gazelle, or herself.


	6. Chapter 6

Their weapons are confiscated and their wrists are zip-tied tightly behind their backs. It makes her recall what Ali used to say when he was helping her with some of the training modules. _Always zip ties, Roxy, never handcuffs, if you can help it. It’s trickier to escape from the former than you’d think, and far easier from the latter._ Kingsman’s zip ties are even reinforced with steel filaments. Gazelle’s prosthetic arm is removed and she’s frogmarched at gunpoint in front of them, frostily compliant, not even casting so much as a resentful glance towards her captors. She won’t even look at Roxy.

“I’m sorry, Rox,” Eggsy whispers to her as they are led the short distance from the house to what will surely be their nearby transport. There are no civilians out on the sleepy daytime streets here, either coincidental or intentional, Roxy can’t discern. “They got the drop on me. Had a gun to my head before I even knew they was there. Merlin’s a sneaky fucker when he wants.”

“It’s not your fault. I’m the one who should be sorry for getting you into this mess in the first place. I swear to you, I’ll fix this, Eggs. You deserve the least amount of blame.”

“It was my choice,” Eggsy affirms. “I would have done it again. Would have done anything for Ha….”

Merlin orders them into the back of a stuffy, windowless van where they’re additionally secured with leg shackles looped through thick metal D-rings in the van’s walls and floor. He always was the once bitten, twice shy sort.

There’s a small window between the back of the van and the front seats that is covered with a thick metal grate. It makes it difficult to actually see through, but she can recognise the shape of Merlin’s bald head from anywhere. She has to try. The air feels desperately suffocating. “I wasn’t trying to betray Kingsman, Merlin. Please. You have to believe—”

“Open your mouth again and I’ll have you gagged,” Merlin replies, not even looking up from his tablet.

The rest of the car ride is carried out in terrible silence.

When the van finally stops and the back doors are opened, Roxy has to squint from the sudden influx of light, looking out onto a remote airstrip and Kingsman jet. “Where are we going?” The thought of flying all the way back home to England fills her with mounting dread.

Surprisingly, Merlin answers her. “Hong Kong office for now. I’ve been working out of there since we traced you to Ningbo.”

They’re led onto the jet, which is still just as ridiculously luxurious as the last time she was on one, only she didn’t have her wrists and ankles uncomfortably secured to the seat. Gazelle’s one wrist is secured to the armrest to her right. Eggsy to the seat across from them. She’s glad it would be a short flight.

With the warmth of Gazelle’s arm laid out along hers, Roxy turns her head, taking in her stoic profile, from the blunt cut of her fringe to the stubborn set of her jaw, as she steadfastly keeps her gaze straight ahead, though surely she sees Roxy in her periphery.

“There wasn’t going to be any other way out of this,” Roxy tries to explain. “At least no other way that would have been acceptable.”

“I would never have accepted defeat,” Gazelle finally says, giving her the briefest of looks, full of scathing intensity.

Gazelle’s disappointment shouldn’t even matter, but it still feels like a blow. Roxy always hated letting others down, even when it seems to be the story of her life. “You went along quietly enough.”

“My success here has always hinged upon yours. You fail, I fail.”

“It’s not over yet. Merlin will understand once I explain—”

“Explain what? That you felt compelled to comply with my demands to not let me be taken in by your organisation? That I gave you no other choice?” Gazelle shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“It does,” Roxy insists. “We almost have Stephen. With Kingsman’s help, we may be better off.”

“I won’t tell your people anything. My laptop running the scan back in the flat is programmed to wipe all traces of its data after three wrong password attempts,” Gazelle says coolly. “You’ll have nothing. Even with your Merlin, it will take weeks to catch up to where we were and by then it will be too late.”

Roxy just stares at her. “You’re bluffing.”

“Try me, then.” Gazelle shrugs.

Back to this again. Roxy ought to have known better, but it still feels like the rug’s been ripped out from under her, leaving her reeling. “Do you really not care about what could happen if Valentine’s tech gets out into the world for anyone to use?”

“I’ll take my chances.” And off Roxy’s disbelief, she says, “Whatever happens next is your problem. Not mine.”

“Then why did you even help us in the first place? If you wanted to escape so badly, there were a dozen different times you could have done!”

But Gazelle is apparently finished speaking to her. She returns to staring straight ahead and refuses to answer despite the increasingly pleading look Roxy gives her.

Finally, Roxy has no choice but to snap her gaze away, catching Eggsy’s. He’s getting better at maintaining his poker face these days. Roxy finds herself sorely missing that soft boy who wore his heart and sharp edges equally and as flagrantly as one of his flimsy jackets.

He’s carefully neutral now, edges all smoothed out.

 _This isn’t over_ , she promises.

 

_____

 

The Hong Kong office is located on the sixtieth through eightieth floors of a towering skyscraper overlooking the dense, packed city and its harbour beyond. Once they step off the lift, her bonds are snapped off and she’s separated from the others, brought to a conference room with a long executive table lined with ergonomic chairs. The floor-to-ceiling windows give her a breathtaking view of the smoggy but profoundly beautiful sunset. Not exactly an atmosphere that inspires intimidation so much as melancholy.

Merlin stands at the windows in silhouette, back to her. His spine is very straight, shoulders tense as if to spite the lovely softness that the diffused light makes of the world around him.

Where to even begin? “Merlin. I’m so sorry.”

Merlin turns his head slightly, just enough for Roxy to see the corner of his glasses over his shoulder. “For what?” he asks, seemingly curious, but Roxy can feel how perilously thin the ice is upon which she is about to tread.

“I went against orders, but I swear it was for a very good reason. If you’ll only let me explain—”

“I think I can put most of it together,” Merlin says, immediately shutting her up. “Gazelle offered you something you couldn’t refuse. Not a bribe. You’re not the type that can be bought. She appealed to your principles. It would have had to been something that would have posed a significant threat to others, some nasty little piece left behind by Valentine. She made you choose between her and Kingsman. Your sense of duty forced your hand and so you went on the run. Your objectives intersected with Eggsy’s when you tracked down Stephen Wang, who I believe is the person you and Gazelle were after. When he eluded your initial grasp, you convinced Eggsy to help you in your quest. When we finally caught up to you, you were preparing to go after Wang again. Does that sound about right?”

Roxy swallows, feeling wrong footed. “In very broad terms, yes. Wang has Valentine’s research on the SIM cards. He’ll be able to recreate them.”

“Do you think I don’t know how the game is played, Lancelot? That I haven’t been at this for over thirty years, which is longer than you’ve even been alive?”

It’s difficult to remain looking at him, even when he doesn’t look at her. She can see his reflection in the glass and it’s enough. That expressionless face, the flatness of his voice.

“Then you had to have known Gazelle would never have broken under your interrogation methods. The Russians already tried,” Roxy says. “The only way she was willing to cooperate was on her terms, and this was too important to leave to chance!”

“You don’t know what we would have done,” Merlin says. “You merely assumed in all your _months_ of experience and hard-earned wisdom, is it?”

His voice is lined with soft, bitter mockery, and it’s crueler than anything she’s heard from him before, even when he so casually announced the prospect of their gruesome deaths when they were jumping out of a plane without, perhaps, parachutes.

“I had thought….” Her cheeks feel like they are permanently on fire even as the rest of her is cold and numb. “I thought it would be more along the lines of our interrogation training. Our NLP methods….”

“And what do you think Gazelle has been doing to you all this time?”

It pulls Roxy up short. There’s an instant denial on her tongue, but it dies before it can ever leave her lips.

_“Has that ever been something that would stop you from doing the right thing?”_

The stupid quid pro quo games.

_“You’re already giving up?”_

The quiet moments at night, the breeze pulling through her hair over the Black Sea.

 _"He_ sees _me."_

Sharing her history, if any of it were even true.

 _“Sounds like_ you _were bored.”_

The heat of her skin. All those touches. The way her body moved in the rain.

_“You fail, I fail.”_

It hits her like lightning, illuminating the world in sharp, clear contrast. Despite being proud of herself for recognising all those times Gazelle was trying to manipulate her, she still ended up doing everything Gazelle wanted. _Everything_. 

“Oh my God,” she whispers, leaning forward to brace herself against the sturdy table, wishing the floor would simply open up beneath her feet, hell, all sixty of them. Let her disappear into the bloody earth.

Merlin finally turns all the way around, his expression not quite pitying, but wearily resigned. “You didn’t trust us. You didn’t trust me.”

“I’m such a bloody fool. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” she can only babble over and over again before she covers her mouth to stop it, closing her eyes and swallowing the rest of it back down until it forms a hard lump in her throat.

It’s quiet. Merlin doesn’t speak. The AC unit blasts freezing cold air into the room, making her shiver.

When she feels like she has some semblance of control over herself again, when it feels like she swallowed a rock that sits hard and leaden in her stomach, she opens her eyes once more and calmly asks, “What will happen now?”

“We follow through on what you’ve been working on.” And when Roxy just stares at him incredulously, Merlin says, “If what you believe and went against orders for is true, then it’s a credible threat. We’d be fools not to take it seriously.”

“She won’t talk to you. She’s been in total control this whole time,” Roxy says. Bitterness burns at the back of her throat. “She’s the only one who will be able to find Wang, but she holds all the cards and time is limited.”

“So I see.”

“Then what do we do?”

“I’ll speak with her.” Merlin holds up a hand when Roxy is about to protest. “I’ve dealt with people like her before, Roxy. Please give me some fucking credit.”

Roxy nods, feeling the flush of shame once again over the indirect reminder of her inexperience. The thought makes her lightheaded; she abruptly pulls out one of the chairs and falls into it gracelessly. “Will I be...I don’t know. Arrested? Imprisoned? Kicked out?” She doesn’t want to voice the last and worst option. _Executed?_

“I haven’t decided yet,” Merlin says, which makes Roxy want to gnash her teeth in frustration. “The truth is, Roxy, we don’t have much of a Table left. You and Eggsy are pretty much it for active agents, and the world is in too rough shape to start doling out fitting punishments now.”

The substantial weight of dread is lifted from her shoulders, even though it’s a little bit awful to be so relieved, knowing she’s only escaped the consequences for now because of her indispensability. “How are the others? Is Ali...Percival alright?” _Has he woken up yet?_

Merlin’s face does something she’s never seen before. Naked alarm briefly flashes across his eyes that quickly mutates into realisation, then sorrow. “Ah. You’ve been out of communications these last few weeks. You wouldn’t have heard.”

“Heard what?” Roxy demands, despite knowing she doesn’t want to hear what Merlin is going to say. Knowing. “Heard _what_?”

“Percival developed a rather aggressive case of pneumonia, as can happen with patients who remain on respirators long term. The doctors caught it rather late. They administered antibiotics, but…” Merlin pauses as if unsure what to say next. “He passed away a week ago. I’m very sorry, Roxy.”

Roxy stares at her hands spread out across the surface of the table, the tips bloodless from how hard she presses them into the wood, wishing she could make the thing crack apart and shatter so she doesn’t have to.

“Am I free to go now?” she asks, and her voice sounds very far away to her own ears. “I would like to go now, please.”

Merlin studies her closely before replying in a carefully measured tone, “There are guest rooms five floors up. I suggest you go straight there and make use of one for the time being. Get some rest.”

She nods somehow, even though it feels like someone else is controlling her body and she is now a mere spectator to her life. It’s certainly not her giving it orders to stand up, and move towards the door. It’s not her that walks down the bland, nominally corporate hallway and stops the first tech worker she sees.

“Where is the prisoner being kept?” asks a voice that sounds a lot like hers, only there’s something off about it, something not quite right.

“Floor seventy-two,” the boy replies a little nervously. Roxy can’t understand why, but she doesn’t really care.

“Thank you.”

It’s not her doing any of it, because then she loses time, like accidentally falling asleep despite her best intentions. One moment she is staring at the inside of the polished chrome doors of the lift as they soundlessly slide shut and the blood is roaring in her ears—

“You _played_ me!”

—and the next, she’s grabbing two handfuls of Gazelle’s shirt, watching those dark eyes, usually so cool and detached, widen in surprise as Roxy yanks her up from her bed and slams her against the wall, her own voice ringing off the blindingly spartan surfaces of the prison cell.

“You played me this whole time! You— _you_ —after what you did! You _killed_ him. It was you! You killed _him_! You killed him and all this time I...I....”

It becomes too difficult to speak. Her throat closes up. There’s no more air coming in. Her chest feels like it’s going to burst.

Her hands go numb, petrified into claws. She roughly pushes away from Gazelle and stumbles. She can’t feel her legs or any sense of direction. Her body no longer feels like a body at all. It is a hole, a deep, bottomless abyss, fracturing open at her core, and everything is crumbling into it.

The world blurs and spins, she doesn’t know how to hold on, as the cool slate tile floor rushes up to meet her—

 _Who was he?_ comes the voice, steady and cold as a winter night.

Amidst the thick, rollicking turmoil, the roaring static, Roxy grasps onto the question like a life line. _Percival._

 _Did you love him?_ A little more clear.

 _Of course_. _He gave me everything._

_How?_

_He showed me—he showed me what I could be. He let me be it._

_What are you?_ A crystal clear demand.

 _Lancelot, a...oh, God. I’ve failed him. He’d be so disappointed in me._ The static begins to crackle again, swarming up like locusts until—

_Did you become a Kingsman agent just to live up to someone else’s expectations? Isn’t that what you were trying escape?_

No. Yes. But his expectations were always different from everyone else’s. They were never about what he wanted or what anyone else in the damn world did, for that matter.

 _Isn’t that what he was_ freeing _you from?_

Roxy opens her eyes. Or tries to. They feel prohibitively swollen.

It’s night. There’s only a dimmed lamp left on in the room, giving everything a muddy orange haze.

She’s in a bed. The sheets are starched stiff and smell like obnoxiously floral detergent. She turns onto her side and pulls them up to her chin anyways because she lost all her armour somewhere and is now nothing more than a vulnerable sack of flesh and blood.

Belatedly, she realises there’s a heavy warm body beside her, concerning for the way it doesn’t concern her at all. She twists to look over her shoulder.

Eggsy is propped up against a few pillows, playing some sort of animated game on his phone. His hair sticks straight up in the back. The cool blue glow flickers across his face. A jaunty little tune quietly blares from the speakers.

“Crushing candies?” she asks, voice hoarsely thick from sleep.

“Fuckers deserve it,” he confirms.

“What time is it?”

“Just gone two in the morning.” The phone makes a sad, defeated noise and Eggsy sighs, dropping it to the mattress on his other side and turning his head to look back at her. “Been down for awhile.”

“Hardly feels like I’ve slept at all,” she admits.

“Don’t blame you,” he says, brow dipping in worry. “Heard about your sponsor. I’m so sorry, Rox.”

It still doesn’t feel quite real. There’s a considerable part of her that is unaffected by it all, because someone must obviously be mistaken. Ali is back at Kingsman HQ, still asleep, healing, getting stronger.

Most of him, his skull, was crushed beneath an out-of-control bus on V-Day. But he didn’t die immediately. She took that as a hopeful sign. He was so strong. He had already been through so much.

And yet lying here now, her heart feels like it has been turned to stone. Her head is dull and light, like everything that could possibly cause her pain has been scraped out. It’s a curious, paradoxical state of being.

They could have warned them when they discovered Arthur's treachery. Saved them. They hadn't.

She flips around to face him, further winding the sheets and blanket around her body, and lays her head against the broad expanse of his chest. His arms come round to hold her. He gives off heat like a bloody furnace and his body makes all sorts of curious internal noises when she presses her ear to his chest. He used to be more wiry, too thin from a life of too little food and too much fear-fuelled running, but it’s all thick muscle pillowing her cheek now.

“I think I went a little mad,” she confesses, remembering that anchoring voice keeping her tethered to reality when nothing else made sense. It was distinctly accented.

Eggsy snorts. She feels him twitch beneath her. “Yeah, you did. We all thought you was gonna kill Gazelle. Under any other circumstance, I’d have said ‘have at’, but….”

“But we need her,” Roxy sighs.

“I told Merlin about Harry. You should have seen his face, Rox,” Eggsy says softly. “Merlin likes to pretend he’s actually a robot, but I think I took about ten years off his life with that one. He’s gonna cooperate now. I know it. He wants to find Harry just as bad as me.”

“I’m glad he’s still alive, Eggsy.” And she is, she really, truly is. She knows she ought to resent him now for getting to have the one thing she cannot, but she’s witnessed too many nights of his grief, the way sorrow slowly hollowed him out. She doesn’t think she has it in her to wish that kind of despair on anyone. “We’ll get him back.”

There’s a long bout of silence, more introspective than uncomfortable, until Eggsy finally says, “All you ever did was listen to me bang on about Harry. Never really said much about yours, though.”

It’s a wordless invitation to take up or disregard. No pressure. He was always so intuitive with people.

She hardly even knows where to begin, but she wants to. It feels too heavy and toxic to carry alone anymore. “He’s my cousin, more or less. We actually hadn’t been that close growing up, but I always found him so...interesting. I can’t imagine what he saw in me. He wasn’t like any of the other people in my family. Never gave a damn about appearances or what was proper. He was, as my grandmother used to say, _in that way_. That is to say, a gay man.”

It feels odd to say out loud now. Neither she nor Ali had ever referred to him as such, given their conservative environment.

“He was kicked out of the family when I was young. My mother even once accused him of kidnapping and molesting me—wrongly, I should add. Didn’t see him for many, many years, not until uni.”

“Jesus,” Eggsy says. “That’s....”

“Yeah,” Roxy agrees. “Did you know he was romantically involved with my predecessor? He recruited me to fulfill his position. Said he couldn’t bear to see anyone else in that chair.”

“Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get it after all, hey?”

“I only ever met him once. James, that is—the previous Lancelot. He was...well, gregarious, but he seemed to make my cousin really happy, and that made me happy, because if anyone was overdue for it, it was Ali.” Roxy closes her eyes. “And look how long that lasted.”

“Hey. Look at it this way, somewhere they’re together again, yeah?” Eggsy squeezes her just a little.

“Yeah,” she reluctantly concurs, thinking of all the small looks they gave each other at the table, a whole other conversation for which only they knew the language. “I knew he was sad. He tried putting on a brave face for me during the trials, though. Encouraging. Helpful. But he had just been so...defeated.”

His shoulders sagged and his spine bowed when he didn’t think she was looking, like it took too much effort just to remain upright and get on with living. She saw it all before. She knew the look of someone in pain.

“We went to their home in our twenty-four hours together, it was full of all their things. You couldn’t tell what belonged to whom anymore. It’s like when you get that close to someone, you just keep leaving parts of yourself with them, and they with you. Pretty soon you can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins. Any separation gets messy. Part of me suspects...part of me suspects he had stopped fighting at the end of it. He’s not like Harry. He was just done.”

It takes another few moments of silence to process the implications of that: being so exhausted that it overcomes one’s inborn will to survive.

“Makes you wonder why anyone would ever want to do this,” Eggsy says. “When all it ever seems to do is break your heart.”

Still, Eggsy’s chest rises and falls. His too big heart beats with ferocity. She sighs and lets the rhythm lull her into a kind of temporary peace where yesterday is far, far away and tomorrow will never come. “Guess we’re all just a little bit mad ourselves.”

 

_____

 

It’s just plain, transparent glass, not a two-way mirror, through which Roxy can observe the proceedings of the next room (another bland business conference room, the HK office is really taking this corporate camouflage seriously). Its participants, in turn, can look back at her should they want. Still, it doesn’t deter her from watching with avid interest as Merlin sits across the table from Gazelle, unflinchingly meeting her eye in a match of wills.

It’s Merlin who begins, calm and authoritative, in a tone that is comforting but inevitable, making even the most lopsided deal sound warm and ethically reassuring. “If you agree to help us track down Stephen Wang _and_ lead us to the location of where you’re keeping one of our agents, then we will make note of your cooperation to the UN, which may, in turn, have a positive bearing on your sentence.”

Gazelle hardly looks impressed. “How about I help you find Stephen _and_ get you back your man—who I didn’t have to save, by the way—and then I walk free.”

“You attempted to slaughter nearly seven billion people on this planet,” Merlin points out. “That’s not something one just gets to walk away from without consequence. A number of different authorities would like to have a say in that one as well.”

“As far as the world is concerned, I’m already dead,” Gazelle says. “My crime has been paid for with the ultimate sacrifice.”

“Clearly, that’s not the case.”

Gazelle scoffs. “You’d be the only one who knew the truth, and Kingsman isn’t in the business of due process or evening the score. Your entire existence is outside the bounds of the law. Collectively, you’ve all committed a number of crimes, assassinations, and acts against the state to be executed several times over.”

“And?” Merlin asks testily.

“Legally speaking, we’re not so different, you and I.”

“Intention,” Merlin bites out. “We work to maintain global peace and stability while your former master attempted global genocide.”

“One could argue ridding the planet of its most egregious parasite would achieve a more effective global stability than your methods.”

“And it’s that kind of thing that makes letting you loose on the world utterly unthinkable.”

“What is it you want to see happen here?” Gazelle leans forward, voice almost taunting. “Achieving your time-sensitive goals of preventing a potentially catastrophic weapon from being leveraged by opportunistic terrorists, or empty justice served on some grand cosmic level?”

Merlin, damningly, remains silent, lips pressed together in a hard line. “Or we could make what will consist of the rest of your life a living hell.”

She sits back, rattling the shackles around her legs. A corner of her mouth ticks up.

“Got him by the bollocks, don’t she?” Eggsy mutters from where he quietly joined Roxy in the peanut gallery, arms folded unhappily across his chest.

“She’s got nothing left to lose, has everything we want, and cares far less about whether or not we get it,” Roxy grimly agrees. “Pretty strong hand.”

Eggsy thinks about that. “Right. Well, that’s us fucked then.”

As if sensing Roxy’s gaze, Gazelle’s eyes suddenly shift to look over Merlin’s shoulder, meeting hers head on. For a moment, Roxy imagines the regret there, but when she blinks, Gazelle’s eyes are on Merlin, once again blank.

“I guess I’ll have all the time in the world to find out,” Gazelle says. “Do you?”

And that’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? They don’t. Merlin knows it, but worse, Gazelle knows it too.

 

_____

 

When the hit on Gazelle’s watch program comes, it reveals an invoice for an expedited shipment to Maijieping, which doesn’t even show up on most modern maps.

“One of China’s many victims of urbanisation. It’s pretty much an empty village in the middle of bloody nowhere now,” Merlin mutters as an aerial view of the village pops up on the screen. There’s not much to look at, a mountainous settlement of traditional thatched-roof homes and small plots of land for farming. “But it happens to be where one Wang Shiwei was born. Recent government documents show that the Party granted the Wang family permission to develop the land over fifteen years ago, but there hasn’t been much to show for it since.”

“Can we pull up a sat image now?” Roxy asks on a hunch.

After several minutes of impatiently waiting for the nearest satellites to realign, new visuals gradually populate the screens. The landscape has, suffice to say, drastically changed.

“Fuck me, it’s a whole bloody manufacturing site out there,” Eggsy says, leaning in closer for a better look.

“Not very easily accessible. No nearby motorways or rivers. It can’t at all be cost-efficient,” Roxy adds, eyes narrowing at the puzzling sight.

The whole village, and a good amount of the surrounding forest, had been cleared to make way for several buildings that are distinctly factories, brown dirt replacing the former vast swaths of green. The site wasn’t constructed to house a significant number of workers—there are hardly any extensive carparks or dormitories that would usually accommodate remote manufacturing sites.

“It’s because he didn’t build this for mass manufacture,” Gazelle says, crossing her arms, both flesh and metal now that her newest prosthesis has been grudgingly returned. “He built it for personal use. Check the power output. I can assure you he’s automated everything. The only human workers you’ll find there are hired muscle.”

“The invoice is dated a week ago,” Merlin says. “He must have all he needs by now.”

“Then there isn’t time to waste,” Gazelle says, giving him a pointed look. “We’ve got to go now.”

“We’re still pretending like we’re gonna trust her to fight beside us, not cut and run first chance she gets?” Eggsy asks Merlin and Roxy, shooting Gazelle a suspicious look. 

“I want to see Stephen taken down as much as you do. Besides, there’s only three of you, one of whom is not even an active field combatant,” Gazelle says. “Regardless of whether you trust me or not, you still need me on this.”

“It was just us three against the worst Valentine could throw at us, if you recall,” Eggsy counters smugly.

“And we only succeeded by the skin of our teeth and with a hell of a lot of luck. Unfortunately, Gazelle is correct.” Merlin’s mouth twists. It must gall him to admit as much. “It would take too much time to organise what few resources we’ve got now. That leaves only us to deal with this.”

“So just like not-so-old times,” Roxy says, resigned once more to another last desperate operation to save the damn world. “This time, you’re flying into space, Eggs. I’ll take on the army of hundreds.”

“I would have liked to have fought you,” Gazelle says speculatively while giving her an assessing look. “It would have been interesting.”

“You wouldn’t be standing there and breathing if I had,” Roxy replies in challenge.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Eggsy frowns, offended.

Roxy’s eyes widen as the line of her mouth twists apologetically. “That’s not what I meant. I wasn’t trying to imply…..”

“Alright,” Merlin interrupts, glaring at them like misbehaving children. “That’s enough squabbling. We’ve got to get moving if we want a snowball’s chance in hell of stopping this thing in its tracks. _Now_.”

In less than three hours, they’re in the air headed towards Luoyang. Even with Kingsman’s fastest jet, it’s still a three-hour flight and it’ll be another two-hour drive after that. Roxy spends most of that time alternating between listening to Merlin and Eggsy bicker about which weapons to use (Eggsy is in favour of the _more is more_ approach; Merlin tells him he’s going to blow himself up one of these days and that he doesn’t have to emulate Harry’s stupidity as well) and staring out the window at the thick layer of clouds that thankfully mask the view of the ground far below.

“It wasn’t done with poor intentions.” 

Gazelle had moved so silently, Roxy didn’t even hear her slip into the seat beside hers. She keeps her gaze steadily trained out the window, refusing to even so much as acknowledge her.

“Playing you like that,” Gazelle continues, heedless of Roxy’s lack of reaction. “Not like other things I’ve done. Maybe not even intentionally at all. You knew I didn’t want to be imprisoned. By now, it’s as unconscious to me as breathing. It had to be.”

She can feel the irritating prickle of Gazelle’s eyes along the back of her neck that she resists rubbing at. “Is this your attempt at a terrible non-apology? You should save your breath.”

“We’re a lot alike, you and I.”

And despite herself, Roxy’s head whips around. “We are _nothing_ alike.”

Her adamant and immediate denial makes Gazelle faintly smile. Not the wolfish one, but the one that always takes Roxy off guard with the way it makes her look so damn young that Roxy’s breath catches in her throat. “Haven’t we both, at some point in our lives, just wanted to watch the world burn?”

A truth that hits too close to home. Roxy opens her mouth, but can’t find anything to say, so she closes it again. Finally, she works up enough remaining cold resentment to answer, “At least I demonstrated more restraint in that regard,” before turning back to the window and dismissing her entirely.

 

_____

 

They pull off the narrow, bumpy dirt road a few kilometres before the main factory site itself with the intention of closing the rest of the distance on foot. In the back of the van, Merlin is already at work on its central console system, towers of screens and various multi-hued indicators providing the sole source of light in the otherwise dark bed.

“The only blueprints for the site I could find was what was filed with the local municipal government some ten years ago. There’s a strong likelihood it won’t be entirely accurate, but it’s better than nothing, so listen closely.”

Roxy touches the lapel of her Kingsman suit, pinching the fabric between her fingers like a reminder. It’s a little hot for the climate, but she’s not going to complain after fearing she’d never be able to wear one again.

“Galahad will announce himself in the southeast corner of the factory where there should be the least amount of possible civilians, if any.” Merlin points to what looks like a storage room. “Gazelle, Lancelot, that should give you a decent amount of cover to infiltrate the main premises, starting with the primary offices in the northwest quadrant of the building. Your first priority is to secure that research.”

“And what about Stephen?” Gazelle asks.

“While a nice bonus,” Merlin says, “We have to focus on what’s most important first, and that’s making sure Valentine’s SIM card research remains out of the hands of anyone who means to use it.”

Gazelle frowns, clearly unhappy with this pronouncement.

“And what will you do then?” Eggsy asks.

“I’ll be making sure Wang will have a hell of a time trying to escape.” Merlin grins, and even Roxy has to admit it’s a disconcerting sight. “There’s a helicopter on the roof which looks to be his only means of rapid transport. I’m going to disable it.”

It’s a haphazard plan at best, they’re going in half-blind and severely outmanned, but a) they’re old hands at this kind of thing now and b) they don’t have any other choice.

It’s a bit of a tromp through the woods, which would be idyllic were it not for the mosquitoes whining in their ears and taking the occasional draw of blood, and the weight of their gear strapped to their backs. The undergrowth is thick and difficult to navigate in oxfords. Gazelle looks like she wishes she still had her blades to easily hack through it all.

Finally, they glimpse the edges of the factory buildings through the tree branches.

“Ready?” Merlin prompts Eggsy, who proceeds to set down his cases and gleefully pull out an impressively large gas grenade launcher.

“Subtle,” Gazelle remarks.

“Let’s call it my way of saying ‘hullo’.” Eggsy smirks before turning back towards the buildings, sighting down the scope and making a few last-minute adjustments. “Target acquired. Initiating welcome protocol.”

Merlin sighs. “That’s not a protocol. You’ve literally just made that up.”

“Well it sounds pretty fucking cool, innit,” Eggsy argues, his eyes all but pleading _let me live_! “It _should_ be.”

“Just get on with it.”

“Fine. Say hello, you bastards,” Eggsy mutters before sending a canister through the air with a loud _pop_.

Roxy watches the hissing arc neatly cut across the distance and disappear through one of the windows of the factory. A second later, the whole side of the wall begins to warp outwards as it tries to contain the heat and pressure within, ultimately failing when the whole thing blows out into massive fireball.

“God, that’s _lovely_ ,” Eggsy crows, punching a fist through the air like his favourite team just won the match.

Even Merlin gets an excited little gleam in his eye when he looks upon the results. _Boys and their toys_. “Well done. Lancelot, Gazelle, off you go. Galahad, I hope you’re up for guests.”

“Always. I’ve been told I’m a very thoughtful host.” Eggsy’s smile is anticipatory, well within his element now as he drops the launcher and disgustingly cracks all his knuckles and then his neck.

“Give them hell, Galahad,” Roxy says before setting off, keeping within the shadows of the treeline to skirt around the edges of the property for the west exit, Gazelle close on her heels.

As she tries to avoid stones and tree roots, she keeps an eye on the blaze sending plumes of black smoke into the sky. The alarm goes off. Several men are already running over to the fire, guns drawn and looking for an assailant. Eggsy pops out of the trees at a dead run, and the closest guard doesn’t even have time to aim before Eggsy ducks low and does something tricky with his legs that resembles a breakdancing move, knocking the guard clear off his feet.

“There,” Gazelle says, and Roxy can’t keep her attention divided for much longer when Gazelle points out the small, nearly obscure door that comes into view. It’s a straight dash across the clearing without any cover, but it seems Eggsy has done his job well—no one is about to witness them running across the grounds.

The door, however, is controlled by a fingerprint and keycard.

It’s a momentary setback that’s swiftly and surprisingly resolved when Gazelle sets off to hunt down a guard en route to the inferno and the seemingly crazed lone attacker who instigated it, rendering him unconscious with several key whacks across his skull with her bionic arm.

“This would be easier if we simply cut off his finger,” Gazelle growls as she uses her enhanced strength to one-handedly drag the dead weight of his unconscious body behind her, propping him against the door like a rolled-up carpet.

“Please let’s not.” Roxy bashes his index finger against the scanner, then when nothing happens, tries his thumb, relieved when the light flips green. “I was really hoping to avoid slicing off any body parts today.”

After following up with the card from the guard’s belt, the lock beeps affirmatively and the bolt grinds against metal as it retracts. Gazelle drops the guard to the ground like a boring toy.

She holds Gazelle’s eyes for a moment, bracing herself for whatever they may encounter on the other side, and with a reaffirming nod, opens the door.

The scent of metal and petrol hits her first, followed swiftly by a sense of the factory’s immensity: a hollowness to the alarm still ringing out, the HVAC cycling the air. The floor of the factory is filled with machinery, assembly lines, and what Roxy can only assume are various robotic arms. In the dark, utterly still, they look like spindly trees with twisted branches.

For a moment, she thinks they’ll have an easy time of it. The factory is all but empty.

Then Gazelle shouts, “Get down!” and Roxy turns in time to catch the green beam of a laser guide before she’s ducking beneath Gazelle’s body as a storm of bullets light up the dark. The clamour is immense, bullets ricocheting dangerously off metal surfaces, gunpowder mixing in the air with what Roxy suspects are highly flammable chemicals. Beneath the veil of Gazelle’s hair, their gazes meet. “Our turn?”

“Our turn,” Gazelle nods.

For the sake of not inadvertently blowing themselves up, Roxy foregoes her sidearm and rolls beneath a conveyor belt to barrel into the first guard’s legs and knock him off balance while Gazelle swings over it to straddle the man’s neck, using the momentum to knock him to the ground and twist it with a decisive snap. It’s so perfectly coordinated that Roxy has to pause and stare at Gazelle, who looks back.

But whatever mutually unspoken understanding passes between them is quickly scuttled when the sound of numerous footsteps and shouts enter the floor and the beams of torches flit across their faces. It’s the only warning they get before they are forced to take cover from the renewed hail of bullets in their direction.

With her Kingsman suit hugging her body, Roxy has less to fear than a few more bruises, moving around a bulk of machinery to take out the nearest guard with a few well-placed strikes to his kidneys, backs of his knees, and neck, before moving swiftly onto the next, knocking his assault rifle aside to land a fist to his throat and vulnerable stomach, before the rest can realise she’s breached their line.

Gazelle takes advantage of the chaos, grabbing a guard’s gun to shove it away, only needing to strike him in the face once with her bionic hand before he’s laid out unconscious on the floor and she’s moving on to give him a few more similarly inclined friends. There are no blades to easily cut through bone and sinew, but Gazelle’s legs are strong from a lifetime of using them all the same; a hard kick to the temple with the heavy blunt force of a prosthetic foot proves to be just as effective.

As they cut through the men, gradually Roxy becomes aware of how well they fit together, two partners of a dance, how she instinctively knows where Gazelle will move next, and how she can seamlessly slot in her own body to complement her. When Gazelle takes a good smack to the jaw that throws her off balance into one of the machines, Roxy fists her hands together and smacks the guard across the ear before driving her knee between his shoulder blades, propelling him forward just in time to meet Gazelle’s retaliatory kick to the face.

The guards are large and well built. They’ve got strength, bulk, and numbers on their side, but she and Gazelle have speed, precision, and a seemingly bottomless well of vindication. It feels, for a moment of pure adrenaline and the heat of the fight, like unstoppable power.

When the last guard goes down with a crushed trachea from the might of Gazelle’s metal fist, she finds Roxy’s gaze once more, breathing heavily, fringe plastered in sweat-soaked clumps against her forehead, and a promising number of new bruises ready to bloom across her face. Her eyes are wild and bright in the near darkness, fuelled by something that her body can barely contain, trembling with it.

What makes her reach up and touch the bleeding cut on Gazelle’s lower lip, Roxy doesn’t know.

Gazelle starts, pitching forward, then jerks back just as swiftly. It’s enough to shake Roxy back into her good senses and drop her hand. “The office is down the hall.”

No more guards impede their path; soon they see why when they find the office all too recently and hastily abandoned: lights and computers still on, chairs still warm.

“We must have just missed him,” Gazelle says with a note of frustration. “He’s headed to the roof. Most likely attempting to escape with the research. There must have been another way out.”

“Merlin’s on the roof,” Roxy realises, before touching the frames of her glasses to activate the comms. “Merlin? Do you copy?”

Nothing. Not even white noise.

Roxy swears. “We’ve got to get up there!”

They take off down the dark corridors, retracing the route they memorised from the outdated blueprints. There are an alarming number of doors and hallways Roxy doesn’t recall seeing in the plans. It’s disorienting, made worse by the unceasing wail of the klaxons, but Gazelle suddenly latches onto her wrist and drags her through another unexpected door to a musty-smelling stairwell.

They make their way up the four flights just as fatigue begins settling in, the bone-deep ache of all the hits and bullets Roxy accrued starting to wear through the remaining dregs of her energy. Her breaths echo up the walls along with the clamber of their feet, but she doesn’t stop. She can’t.

Gazelle pauses before the door to the roof, palms splayed across the latch and eyeing Roxy over her shoulder. Roxy unholsters her gun from beneath her suit jacket and switches the safety off with a flick of her thumb, bracing herself. She nods once to Gazelle, who immediately shoves open the door and flattens herself against it as Roxy steps out, performing a one-eighty scan.

The night sky is awash in hues of orange. A hot breeze from the raging inferno behind them hits her cheeks. The helicopter sits at the end of the roof, still and quiet, though there’s someone in the pilot’s seat clearly trying to get it up and running.

Four guards aim their weapons at them.

Off to the side is Stephen, pointing his gun not at Roxy and Gazelle, but at Merlin, who is on his knees, missing his glasses and barely able to hold himself up. _Must have been a good knock to the head_ , she thinks.

“I should have known it was you,” Stephen says as soon as he spots Gazelle. “You just don’t know when to give up, do you?”

“You had something of mine,” Gazelle says simply. “I wanted it back.”

Stephen laughs mirthlessly, shaking his head. “I have to hand it to you, Gazelle. You haven’t lost your edge as much as I thought. Though I didn’t think you’d be desperate enough to join up with...whoever these glorified bankers are.”

“Spies with good fashion sense,” Roxy supplies, her gun never wavering from where she trains it on Stephen despite the four other guns trained on her.

“Yes, I do seem to recall one of your besuited colleagues rather successfully putting a stop to Valentine’s plans. Watched the footage from the bunker. Very impressive job he did. I’m grateful the world didn’t end, by the way. However, I do have to ask you be a good little girl now: put down your weapon and kick it over to me or I put a bullet in your friend’s head.” As if to make a point, Stephen prods the barrel of his gun into the back of Merlin’s skull, causing him to close his eyes briefly, skin taking on a concerning white shade. “I’m already half inclined to do it anyway considering what he’s done to our helicopter.”

Roxy eyes them and tries to think of what she can do. Her mind calculates the distance between her and the guards, between Gazelle and Stephen, how much she can push her tired, sore body just a little bit more.

How she can get out of this and keep everyone alive.

When she meets Gazelle’s eyes, Gazelle just shakes her head, and Roxy is immediately struck by a sense of deja vu.

She switches on the safety and raises her hands to signal her surrender, bending her knees to slowly lower herself to the ground and lay down her weapon, her free hand brushing against her glasses as if by accident. When she straightens, she kicks the gun away, watching it slide across the roof and stop somewhere halfway between them.

Immediate threat now removed, Stephen returns his attention back to Gazelle. “You know, Gazelle, it doesn’t have to be this way. You have so much fight in you, I’d really prefer not to have to kill you like this. Why don’t we let bygones be bygones? Why not join me? We’ll kill the spies and then go on to make obscene amounts of money.”

Roxy looks at Gazelle, watching the way she tilts her head as if actually considering the offer, because why wouldn’t she? There’s nothing tying her to Kingsman. She only did what she had to keep herself out of prison.

And Gazelle is far from stupid: she knows Kingsman won’t simply let her walk away after this is finished.

“I would rather see that helicopter blown to pieces before I let that happen,” Roxy declares, slowly and with perfect enunciation. “That helicopter there. Not far from the northwest quadrant.”

Everyone turns to her with bewilderment. Even Gazelle’s brow twitches.

“What are you talking about?” Stephen asks.

Concussed or not, Merlin picks up on it first, features transforming from alarmed to wearily resigned. “Oh for fuck’s sake….”

In her ear, Eggsy practically croons. “Oh darling, you’re always so good to me.”

 _Something_ sails across the sky and pings off the side of the helicopter before clattering across the roof, rolling to a stop before Stephen and his men. They stare at it in confusion before realisation sets in, and by then, it’s far too late.

Roxy dives for the ground, relieved to see Gazelle and Merlin doing the same, just as the helicopter and half the damn roof explodes.

The force of the detonation sends her flying through the air, hitting the roof access door hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs.

Her ears are ringing, as is her whole head, really.

“I’ve really got to start second-guessing these impulses,” she croaks before breaking out into a coughing fit.

“Glad to see you’re alive, sweets,” comes Eggsy’s chipper voice through the glasses that are still miraculously on her face. “That was really fucking awesome, by the way. I’m practically weeping at the beauty."

When she looks around from her slumped position, she sees burning wreckage all around her, the very still bodies of the guards who were closest to the explosion, and Merlin not too far off, moving just enough to indicate he’s at least still alive, thank God.

She blinks away the moisture from her watering eyes and spots Stephen through the smoke, reaching for her nearby gun.

Her heart leaps into her throat and for a moment she thinks, _this is it_ , even as she readies her body back into action once more.

Only to freeze when the bottom of Gazelle’s prosthetic foot slams down on Stephen’s hand just as the tips of his fingers skirt the handle, causing him to cry out in pain.

Gasping, he looks up at her. “Help me get out. I’ll make it worth it. Do you really think these people are going to help you? Look what they did to you! Look at what they did to Valentine!”

As if sensing Roxy’s observance, Gazelle glances over her shoulder to her. There’s an orange glow shining in her black hair and smouldering in her eyes like the very insides of her have been set aflame.

Roxy can’t tell what Gazelle is thinking, as if she ever could. She only knows what a survivor would do, what _she_ would do were she in Gazelle’s position.

And that knowledge is like a lead weight in her stomach.

“You make a compelling argument,” Gazelle says, and Roxy closes her eyes, giving into her body’s exhaustion and despair by slumping against the door. “But I never want any more girls to end up like me.”

When Roxy’s eyes fly open in surprise, she sees Gazelle pick up her gun and aim it at Stephen, finger tightening on the trigger. “Gazelle, no!”

But Gazelle just shakes her head. “He’s too rich and too clever to go through any legal justice system. Remember what I said about billionaires, Roxy? They’ll always run this world.”

Then she squeezes the trigger twice in quick succession, and Stephen’s body slumps to ground.

 

_____

 

Roxy has never met Harry Hart, has never laid eyes upon the man himself in person, and rather feels this introduction shouldn’t count. After all, Harry isn’t awake and he may never still. He can mostly breathe on his own though, a good sign, his medical caregivers assure them.

Through the small window in the door, she watches Eggsy hesitantly take one of Harry’s pale, long-fingered hands within his own, careful not to disturb the many lines seemingly attached to every available vein or the pulse oximeter clipped to his finger. She doesn’t think anything short of an apocalypse could get him to stop staring at Harry’s face as if afraid he’d miss the moment when Harry wakes up, as if he could urge him to do it by concentrated will alone.

In the corner of the room, she can just make out the knobby points of Merlin’s body, who, in spite of suffering what is most certainly a minor concussion from Stephen’s men that was exacerbated by the force of the ensuing blast, nevertheless ordered another chair be brought in and has remained in it ever since: silent, brooding, and immovable as a gargoyle atop a cathedral. Though he’s far better at hiding it, Roxy knows he’s just as profoundly affected at seeing Harry alive. 

The room, already fairly small to begin with, feels crowded after that, so Roxy, the footnote in that particular story, remains in the corridor, breathing in the genuinely unpleasant fecal scent that permeates every medical facility as shallowly as she dares, stubbornly ignoring the almost overwhelming desire to find the nearest flat surface and collapse over it, undisturbed, for the next 72 hours at least.

Instead, she finds an unforgivably uncomfortable chair in one of the small waiting areas, pulls out the mobile Merlin returned to her, and checks the mountain of messages that has accumulated during her absence.

There’s one from her building manager. There was a leak in the flat above hers, right over her bedroom. The manager goes on to describe the event as ranging from a few drops of moisture to a veritable deluge, but has sent contractors out there right away to repair the pipes and ceiling. Her things, however, are her own responsibility and he makes it clear he is not responsible for any damage incurred. So that’s what that funny stain had been.

There’s another from Kingsman’s kennels, a service which both sources puppies to be used for upcoming recruit trials (of which there were to be so, so many, if they could only find the time to stand still and finally _breathe_ ) and cares for the dogs of agents who are out on missions, which is just a roundabout way of giving the groundskeeping staff a chance to muck about with dogs. Geordie is doing well as per usual, but then, Roxy trained him well. Maybe too well, as is her habit to encourage self-sufficiency. He hardly ever seems to need her outside of sustenance, and that’s probably only because she won’t let him go hunting for his own food.

One of the last messages, though, is from her mother, which takes Roxy aback sheerly from the fact she’s bothered to ring her at all. There isn’t much communication between Roxy and her family these days. She knows her parents, her father especially, are still furious with her, quite possibly to the point where they may very well never forgive her. Surprisingly, she doesn’t find herself all too bothered by this fact anymore.

“Oh, Roxanne,” her mother’s much put upon voice begins in the recorded message. “I’ve just heard about Alistair. A terrible thing, what happened. We grew apart, obviously, but I never wished him any bad will, you know. Besides, it’s in poor form to speak ill of the dead.”

Roxy resists the urge to delete the rest of the message without listening to it.

“Anyway, I know you two were still...in touch. I was just wondering if you had any details on the funeral. It’s a bit far and we probably won’t go, mind you, but it might just be...nice...to pay our respects and all that. Give us a call back when you get this.”

After that, Roxy doesn’t have the heart to listen to any more.

The private facility itself isn’t very large, and perhaps only middling in terms of care, located in bloody rural Ohio, USA on top of it all. They never would have found this place on their own, she knows, even if they were aware Harry was alive. It’s not that she feels they owe Gazelle—if anything, this is the very least she could have done after all of it—but Roxy is...grateful. It’s a gentler ending than they usually get in their line of work.

She finds Gazelle waiting at the end of the corridor, leaning against the large picture window that overlooks a long, open field only just starting to turn green. She isn’t sure what surprises her more: the fact Gazelle is still here or how utterly ordinary she appears with knee high boots that mask her prosthetics and her metal arm hidden beneath the long sleeve of a denim jacket and gloves. It’s difficult to imagine that only one day ago they were halfway across the world fighting through an army of guards with just their bare fists and savagery.

Roxy’s feet don’t pause until she’s standing beside her, savouring the wash of sun that streams through the glass panes and warms her skin like a pleasant bath. “I thought you’d be miles away from here by now.”

“How do you figure?”

“You’ve played your last card, haven’t you?” Roxy blinks and turns her head to look at her. 

Gazelle looks back. Her face is covered by streaks of soot and she’s as banged up as much as Roxy is. Still, her eyes glint with something Roxy can only describe as mischief. “Maybe I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.”

“Merlin has no intention of honouring your deal.”

“I know.”

“Then why stay now?”

There’s a long pause before Gazelle answers. “It feels like unfinished business here.”

After letting the words sink in, Roxy takes a deep breath, wishing her thoughts were more coherent. “You’ve killed so many people. You contributed to the death of the only man I really considered to be family...maybe long before he stopped breathing, I suppose. It’s not something I can just...forget.”

From the corner of her eye, she can see the way Gazelle’s mouth presses together.

“And yet we’re all death dealers, aren’t we?” Roxy goes on. “I'm responsible for his death as much as you. I suppose we always have it coming in this line of work. When we’re not handing it out, it’s always nipping at our heels. If not today, then somewhere down the line and...and….”

“What are you trying to say?” Gazelle asks.

“I…” Roxy shakes her head helplessly. “I don’t know. It feels like I don’t know a lot of things I used to think I did.”

Gazelle doesn’t speak, and Roxy feels her cheeks flush with embarrassment and frustration at suddenly being rendered so inarticulate. “There was a moment I thought you were going to take Stephen up on his offer. I don’t even know if I’d have blamed you for it.” Regardless of what Gazelle may actually feel towards the man, it would have meant the financial freedom and resources to stay out of Kingsman’s grasp or that of any other legal entity, and Roxy can’t understand why she didn’t do it.

“You know who we first carried out tests on, even before Kentucky?” Gazelle asks, casting her gaze back out through the window, eyes half closed in deference to the sun. “Terrorist groups. Warmongers. Guerilla soldiers who abused their own people. Later, hate groups. People who only wanted to cause hurt and fear just because they could. I never could stand those types. I sure as hell wasn’t going to give them the means to do more.”

Roxy vaguely recalls the initial images in Valentine’s file, back when they hadn’t connected all the dots yet. Whole terrorist cells dead by each other’s hands. Rogue militias. South Glade Church. Notes in the file suspected rival groups, then a possible vigilante, but why Gazelle would even care, unless…. Roxy swallows down the flood of saliva filling her mouth, hesitating, before finding the courage to ask, “Everything you told me...was any of it actually true?”

Gazelle finally pushes off the window frame and turns fully towards her. She’s slightly taller like this. Roxy has to look up and the effect is unnerving. “Quid pro quo.”

Roxy’s lips turn up in a humourless smile. She didn’t know what she expected and debates on whether to scoff or tell her to forget the whole thing, but Gazelle remains serious. “Fine.” The smile slides off her face as she braces herself for what intrusive question about her personal life she’d be asked next.

Only, instead of a question, Gazelle just looks at her softly and leans in.

Even knowing what will happen, Roxy can’t move. Her heart speeds up, pounding so loudly in her ears she thinks she must be disrupting the whole facility with it.

She feels the radiant heat of Gazelle’s body first, distinct from the sun in the way it sinks into her bones and sings across her nerves. Then Gazelle’s lips are on hers, the only point of contact between them, disarmingly gentle.

Roxy parts her lips, eyes closing of their own accord, pressing forward until her can feel more of Gazelle’s body conforming against hers. It should be familiar, the mechanics work the same, but it’s not. It’s _devastating_. 

The way Gazelle’s skin is smooth, her scent, the hints of smoke and iron inside her cheeks, along the roof of her mouth, the thickness of her tongue, her teeth.

The sensation of being swept away by wildfire, lightheaded and dizzying, like there isn’t enough oxygen in the room.

She feels a warm hand tangle through her mussed hair, an anchor in the maelstrom of her spinning head.

It’s wrong, _this_ is wrong, and yet the knowledge doesn’t stop her own hands from coming up to find purchase around Gazelle’s slender hips, to wonder in her hipbones and the gentlest swell of curves they taper into, which is unexpected too. 

She’s abruptly pulled out of her delirium by a sharp pin prick, right on her arse.

“Ow!” Roxy hisses, breaking off and pulling back to whip her head around, finding Gazelle’s metal hand hovering nearby, holding a thin syringe. She looks back at Gazelle in shock. “What did you….”

And then she feels an avalanche of warmth rushing through her veins, relentlessly dragging her under. Her body feels heavy, too heavy. Her legs are unable to hold her weight as she starts to collapse, only to be caught in Gazelle’s sure hold.

“So sorry, Roxy,” Gazelle says. “Just one more trick.”

Roxy feels her legs swept up and then she’s being carried to God knows where. Her head falls against Gazelle’s shoulder. Her brain forgets how to make her unresponsive mouth form words.

They’re somewhere darker and quieter now where she’s lowered down onto something soft. _A bed_ , she identifies. Starchy sheets, astringent detergent, firm mattress. A medical bed. How considerate.

Gazelle even arranges her numb limbs in a more comfortable position. Most of her is a black blur, but Roxy can still make out her features, which are, she thinks, maybe touched by regret.

A hand brushes the hair from Roxy’s face. Fingers trail down her cheek as the world tunnels and dims. “Remember the question you asked?” Gazelle whispers from as far away as a goodbye and as close as a confession, “Nothing’s ever been more true than this.”

It’s the last thing Roxy remembers before the tide washes over her and, content, she sinks under.

 

_____

 

When the sounds of consciousness fade in again like someone slowing turning up a dial, Roxy tries to open her eyes and finds her vision still blurry. There’s a terrible ache in her head that promises a lengthy stay. It takes everything in her power to remain awake as her last recollections return to her once more.

When she can properly focus, stained dropped ceiling tiles greet her. She turns her head and finds Eggsy curled up in one of those horrendous chairs, playing Candy Crush on his phone again.

“I thought you were supposed to be permanently glued to Harry’s side,” she says, although her uncooperative tongue garbles more of her syllables than not.

“Hey!” Eggsy sits up from his slouch with relief in his eyes. And bless him, they’ve had too many pissed and/or grieving conversations not to understand each other’s slurred dialect. “Yeah, well. Merlin’s in there with him now and it’s not like anything’s gonna change soon, right? But you gave us all a proper fucking scare, you did. Docs found a mild sedative in your bloodstream.” His brows sink as anger flashes across his face. “Did Gazelle do it? Can’t find her anywhere. Cameras showed she nicked a car a few hours ago. She’s long gone now. Knew we shouldn’t have trusted her.”

Roxy nods and licks her lips, still tasting the hint of smoke on them, which Eggsy wordlessly and graciously interprets as a silent plea to fetch her some water. She accepts the plastic cup gratefully, and after moistening her parched throat, she tries to sit up.

Her body is only sluggishly reluctant to obey, and Eggsy automatically reaches out to help her. She can’t help but contrast all the ways his hands feel different across her back: perfectly above board and supportive, of course, but lacking intention, sensuality. The ghost of that memory makes her shiver in spite of herself, and Eggsy, concerned, tries to burrito her up in a blanket that she has to refuse.

“I’m okay,” she assures him. “Really. Just groggy. Never slept so well, though.” She tries to smile.

“Merlin’s spitting mad about it,” Eggsy offers up, everything in his face now screaming his guilt and apology for somehow not stopping something he couldn’t possibly have foreseen, and whilst suffering under his own bout of emotional upheaval as well. One day he’ll have to learn he can’t take on all the world’s burdens. “Said if it weren’t for Harry, he’d commandeer the first car he could get and hunt her down himself. We’ll get her again, Rox. It’s only a matter of time.”

After they get Harry back to England. After they get him to wake up. After they repopulate the Table. After they find their footing again and get back into fighting form again and trust again. After they heal. 

It’s going to be a long time, he doesn’t say.

“It’s alright,” she tells him, pressing her lips briefly together as if she could seal in the memory of pressure and heat, the way her limbs wanted to melt at even the lightest touch. “I know.”

 

_____

 

“Excuse me, but if I may….”

The sound of silverware chiming across glass effectively cuts through the mundane conversations around the restaurant her father hired out for the evening and draws all eyes to the front of the room. The sudden silence is unnerving. Even though the lighting is tastefully muted, Roxy can still feel the weight of dosens of eyes, an uncomfortably hot, prickly feeling that keeps her gaze firmly glued to her thin flute of champagne.

“Very good.” Her father smiles, an insincere turn of his lips that makes him look as if he has a cramp. “As I was saying...I want to thank you all for coming out tonight as we celebrate my daughter, Roxanne, being awarded her degree from Oxford.”

Politely restrained applause rounds out this statement. Roxy tries to smile until her cheeks ache and graciously nods away the adulation. Beside her, Tommy squeezes her hand so tightly it hurts.

Her father barely waits until the applause dies down. “As for what actual use a political science degree has these days remains to be seen!”

Laughter. The smile evapourates from her face.

“But more importantly,” her father continues, “I am also excited to announce the official engagement of my daughter to my good friend and neighbour, Thomas Holton-Shelby’s son, Thomas Junior. And that’s not because it means the acreage of both our estates will increase once the families are joined together.”

More laughter. The applause is nearly deafening this time, humiliatingly more enthusiastic. Tommy holds their joined hands up like a victorious boxer.

“This time next year,” her father says, turning to Roxy and meeting her gaze head on. “We hope to see all of you at the wedding. Let’s have a toast to the impending nuptials, shall we?”

She can barely hold up her glass. It’s as if it suddenly accrues far more gravity.

The engagement ring sits on her finger and catches a glimmer of damning light. 

The champagne tastes like vinegar going down.

The room is a sea of faces, all giving her knowing smiles, the older married women especially. Like they know. _You’ve had your fun, dear, now isn’t it time to settle down and do your duty, don’t you think?_

She has to physically pry her sweaty hand from Tommy’s, scraping her chair against the floor as she abruptly stands, drawing no shortage of curious glances.

Tommy shoots her an uneasy look. “Alright, Roxy?”

“No,” Roxy says in a measured tone, because any slip in her control would have her screaming her bloody head off. “I need some air. Please excuse me.”

Without waiting for a reply, she rushes out of that suffocating room and all those insufferable people. The stark chill of the night air hits her face and she finds herself slumping against the back wall of the restaurant, trying to get her breathing back under some fucking control.

As her pulse calms back down, other sounds gradually trickle in, sizzling and clanging from the kitchen, passing cars from the busy road beyond the mouth of the alley, a feral cat digging through the bins. The street lamps seem to beckon her. She seriously considers making a run for it.

Only, there’s nowhere to go, is there? She could walk around all of London instead of returning to that blasted party, but at the end of the night, she’d still have to come back to the flat her parents paid for and the fiance who lives with her and the wedding that awaits her in one year’s time and the long, tedious life of being a society wife and mother that would come after.

Maybe she could find a job to support herself, only pissing off the Holton-Shelbys would guarantee her name would be blacklisted everywhere before she could even hope to find a foothold. Her parents would probably disown her. The Mortons are rather well-known for it.

The back door to the restaurant swings open again, but Roxy doesn’t turn around, assuming it to be one of the workers tossing out the rubbish.

Only, the presence doesn’t _leave_ , forcing Roxy to finally acknowledge her interloper.

“I take it the party isn’t to your liking.” Ali gives her one of his small, barely-there smiles.

He looks as polished as ever. Nice suit, trim frame, that sense of control and confidence, but now there’s a sallowness to his cheeks and dark circles under his eyes. It hasn’t been three years since she last saw him, since maybe when he last let himself be seen, but everything about his countenance feels aged by decades, from the long, deep lines carved around his mouth to the extinguished light in his eyes.

“Are you alright?” she asks instead of, _Why are you here?_ Because she can’t think of any other question more pertinent.

Ali seems to visibly brace himself, parting his lips to give her an answer, but then briefly pausing as if to carefully measure his words. “James is dead.”

“Oh.” Roxy blinks and isn’t entirely sure she heard correctly. How neatly and quickly a sentence can be uttered and change someone’s entire world. “I’m...I’m so sorry.” There’s that moment of surreality one feels having spoken and laughed and interacted with a living, breathing person who now... _isn’t_.

She only met James that once and if she’s reeling as much as this, she can’t imagine how it must be for Ali now. “I’m sorry,” she repeats rather lamely, instead of daring to risk saying anything insensitive, like ask how it happened and had it been _the job_?

Ali nods, pressing his lips together to stifle anything so inane as, _It’s alright_. It’s not. It might never be again. “I just learned of it this afternoon. It’s...been a long day. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to crash your party. Congratulations, by the way. I know you worked hard for your degree. With honours, as well.”

“Thank you,” Roxy says, feeling wholly inadequate, but unsure of how to be more helpful other than following his lead and simply going along with it.

“What will you do next?”

“Oh,” Roxy says again, the dread rising up in the back of her throat like sick. “I’ll...uh...I’m going to get married, actually. Next year.”

The silence that ensues speaks for itself.

“I see,” Ali says, adjusting his glasses. “Pardon me if this seems out of line, but I hadn’t received the impression that was your initial plan two years ago.”

“It wasn’t.”

Ali hesitates. “Then may I ask what’s changed?”

Roxy looks at him, and to her horror, she feels her eyes sting. “I don’t know. Everything. Life. My parents’ expectations. The whole fucking _world’s_.” Valiantly, she tries to wrestle back down the sense of overwhelming defeat she feels by studying an overflowing fag tray at her feet. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to hear this after everything you must be going through. My problems are pathetic by comparison, I know—”

“Roxy.”

She sniffs and barely manages to look back up at him.

“Are you happy?” Ali asks her sincerely.

 _Aren’t you so happy?_ so many others have asked her before, always more insistence than genuine inquiry, assuming she ought to be all that and more. _Grateful_. _Relieved._

She shakes her head. “No.”

“Then why go through with it?”

“Because I haven’t any other choice.”

“And if I were to tell you that you did?” Ali suggests.

Roxy regards him sceptically. “I’m not...I’m not as strong as you are, Ali. I don’t think I could go it alone.”

“Who says I did it alone?” Ali arches a brow, then closes the few steps of distance between them, leaning against the wall next to her. “Now, I want you to listen closely, Roxy, because I’m going to give you an offer. An offer that someone once made to me when I was as young and very much feeling as you do now.”

“What do you mean?” she asks, her curiosity piqued despite herself, tears all but dried up.

“I’m going to offer you a chance at a new life.” Ali turns his head to meet her wide eyes. His are bloodshot, she only just sees now, and his suit bears the markings of several careless creases. There’s the stale scent of scotch on his breath. But his words are crisp and precise, his manner steady. “It’s not an easy one, though. Good doesn’t always win. It will be...frequently rewarding and full of terrible losses.”

Is that what she sensed two years ago while sitting at his breakfast table beneath a mask of cosy domesticity, the proud set of his shoulders, the calm restraint, the unprotesting acceptance of the world, knowing what was in his control and what wasn’t?

His shine has worn off significantly now with distance and a little more introspection, but what’s left is...nice. Quietly dignified. Real.

“But if you tried your hardest, if you never stopped fighting and if you remain as strong as I know you are, you will make an impact on this world. And this world will make an impact on you.”

Ali gives her a searching look. It can only be called _scrutiny_. He _sees_ her. Knows her for everything she is in that one look. “Is that something you’d want?”

Roxy breathes in like she can fill her lungs with hope. Something indefinable stirs like a creature waking up after a long, cold sleep.

“Yes.”

Ali smiles again, pleased.

And if her heart beats faster, it’s for an entirely new reason now. Inexplicably, she wants to laugh.Or cry, maybe. Something. Anything. The expansive feeling unfurls its wings within her, and she isn’t sure she can contain it.

Because she knows, with every cell of her being, that everything is about to change.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hello on tumblr!
> 
>  **the author:** [futuredescending.tumblr.com](http://futuredescending.tumblr.com)  
>  **the artist:** [lsain.tumblr.com](http://lsain.tumblr.com)


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